Hannah And Her Sisters has one of my favorite scenes in all of film. Woody Allen’s rudderless spiritual seeker goes to a movie theater in a desperate attempt to extricate himself from a suicidal depression. It saves his life. Allen goes into the theater a lost and directionless soul, but leaves it with his spirit renewed and his soul refreshed. The film that saves Allen’s life—a beautiful concept when you think about it—isn’t a portentous drama about the Holocaust or a soul-crushing Ingmar Bergman art film; it’s the spectacular silliness of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. How can Allen even think about plunging headfirst into the abyss after the brothers Marx have reminded him of life’s transcendent goofiness?
There’s something strangely life-affirming about silly movies. They implicitly tell us that life is a lark, not a tragedy. There’s also something weirdly soothing about cinematic formulas. In a sick, sad, often unknowable world, they tell us that life has ironclad rules that persist from year to year and generation to generation. We may not know what the future might bring. We don’t know if we’ll hold onto our jobs or if house prices will rise or fall, but we know that Bruce Willis will always kill the bad guy and get the girl, and probably deliver some terse one-liners while he’s at it. We don’t always want to be confronted by cinema’s ability to reveal profound truths, fuck with our minds, or take us through a gauntlet of harrowing emotions; sometimes we just want to laugh or forget our troubles for 90 minutes or leer at attractive movie stars in exotic locales.
Farce combines explosive, unapologetic silliness with a rigid adherence to formula that can be both liberating and constricting. At its best, farce combines life-affirming silliness with the soothing familiarity of formula. Sure, farces are inherently artificial. In construction and execution, they resemble elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions full of whirring, spinning parts moving in perfect unison more than the messiness of real life. But that’s not necessarily bad.
Take The Man Who Knew Too Little, the second entry in what unexpectedly has become Bill Murray Mid-Career Crises Month here at My Year Of Flops Inc. (This was supposed to be carny month, but my DVD of Carny arrived too late. Look for that one early next year). There is not a single moment in the film that feels even remotely realistic, nor a solitary second of psychological depth or nuanced characterization. On the contrary, The Man Who Knew Too Little delights in its own artificiality. The supporting characters come straight from central casting. The acting is broad and cartoonish enough to embarrass a community theater. And even though the fate of the free world is at stake, nobody ever appears to be in any danger, least of all the protagonist.
In his last live-action comedic starring role to date, Bill Murray plays a good-natured half-wit who dreamt of making it in show business as an actor before settling into a happily mundane existence as a Blockbuster clerk in Des Moines, Iowa. The film’s first scene establishes Murray as the ultimate Ugly American, a hick from the sticks who wants to “try the pudding that is made of meat,” “see the Queen riding a horse,” ride “one of those double-decker buses,” and “get a suit made” but “not have everyone think I’m a tourist.”
Like his character in What About Bob?, Murray has only the best of intentions; he’s a great guy, albeit oblivious to social cues. Yet he nevertheless manages to angry up the blood of everyone around him. In this first clip, for example, the customs officer Murray unwittingly torments somehow manages to remain polite while apparently attempting to murder Murray with his mind.
Murray shows up in London unannounced on his birthday as a “surprise” for older brother Peter Gallagher, an uptight businessman worried that Murray will ruin an important dinner by being himself. So Gallagher decides to distract his brother by paying for him to experience something called “Theater Of Life,” an interactive theatrical sensation that’s kind of like what Michael Douglas went through in The Game, only much sillier. Due to a phone booth (remember those?) mix-up, Murray quickly finds himself immersed not in a harmless, pre-fabricated theatrical experience but in a genuinely deadly situation involving blackmail, treason, and an attempt to resurrect the Cold War by sabotaging a Russian-British solidarity dinner.