I'm not sure what universe Bill Murray inhabits, but it's not ours. I think he just visits here, popping in from time to time to visit old friends and make a few movies. His latest, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, is directed by Wes Anderson, who previously directed Murray in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums; Anderson, too, is not from this earth, so when his universe and Murray's universe somehow align themselves in space and time, weird stuff happens. Good stuff happens.
I won't say anything specific about the movie. It's out now in theatres in big cities in North America. I watched it here in Cambodia. If you've seen Wes Anderson's other movies, you have an idea of what you're in for. If you haven't, and you watch this flick expecting another Ghostbusters or something, I feel for you. Usually, a lot of people come out of Wes Anderson's films saying "I don't get it". This time, I think a lot of Wes Anderson fans will walk out of this Wes Anderson film saying "I don't get it."
This is a good thing. This is a great thing, in fact, because The Life Aquatic is a bizarre, slightly off-kilter experience that resembles Anderson's past work, yes, and it bears some kind of tangential relationship to the real world that we walk through and talk through most of the days of our lives, certainly, but it has an inexplicable, internal logic that our world lacks, and that Wes's world somehow summons at will.
I actually met Wes Anderson in '97 or '98. This was before he had worked with Bill Murray three times, before Martin Scorsese had labelled him his favorite young director, before his first movie had even been released in actual theatres. His first movie was called Bottle Rocket, a small independent movie he had shot with his Texas roommates Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson, and the three of them (along with the older Wilson brother whose name I forget) were schlepping the flick around Canadian college campuses, hoping to generate some buzz before its limited Toronto release.
It wasn't working. At York University, they used to (maybe still do?) have movie nights using the big screens draping the lecture halls. This particular night they had a screening of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, followed by Bottle Rocket, with the director and stars in (nervous) attendance.
A few hundred people laughed their lily-white asses off all the way through Ace Ventura II.
Then came Bottle Rocket.
Then came the sound of seats being thwack-thwuck-thwicked down as people gradually, then rapidly began leaving the theatre. After the movie was finished, there were only a dozen or so people left.
Wes Anderson came out, as did Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson and the other Wilson brother. They didn't look happy. They looked, what's the word, glum. (I felt bad for them. I don't think it was their movie that people didn't like, necessarily; York is mostly a commuter school -- I think people just wanted to get home, that's why they were leaving so early. And hey -- Jim Carrey is a tough act to follow.)
My friend Eric asked a particulary filmish question to Wes Anderson, who replied with a particulary filmish answer. Anderson had geeky classes and Don King hair and looked exactly like they kind of guy who would, and did, inhabit our film classes. (In fact, he looked exactly like the kind of guy who would make movies like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
After the (very brief) q and a was over, me and Eric went up to talk to the director and stars. They were all very nice, low-key guys in their mid-twenties, not much older than us, and I remember talking to Owen Wilson, who later went on to co-star in movies with such no-names as Jackie Chan and Eddie Murphy and Robert DeNiro and Gene Hackman, and I got them all to sign my copy of ESQUIRE with Al Pacino on the cover, and I'm convinced that I was the first one to ever get an autograph from these guys. To tell the truth, my friend Eric and I kind of felt sorry for these dudes, because most of the audience had left during the flick. I cornered them in the hallway outside of the lecture hall and had them sign their names and felt kind of dorky, them not being famous and all, but what the hell.
And then they walked out of Curtis Lecture Hall L that dark and snowy night, probably talking dejectedly about what a poor screening that had been, not knowing that they would soon, in a few short years, be big, big movie stars, and high-profile directors, and that that black and cold York U night would recede into their memory like a bad (but not forgotten) dream.
It's so weird, is all I'm saying. Anderson's movies, Murray being in them, me watching them in Cambodia. I was watching a scene with Owen Wilson arguing with Willem Dafoe, and I suddenly remembered that I had spoken to both of these guys at different points in time, Owen Wilson before he was famous, in a classroom at my school, and Willem Dafoe in a movie theatre in Toronto, when I suddenly realized that the guy waiting in line in front of me was none other than the dude who had died in Platoon and died as Jesus. So I asked him if he was Willem Dafoe, and he sheepishly smiled that creepy smiled and said he was, and I asked him what he was doing in Toronto, and he said filming a movie, and I said which movie, and he said Existenz, by Canadian director David Cronenberg, and I don't know why that's so important to me -- this acknowledgement, as I watched The Life Aquatic here in Cambodia, that I had exchanged a few words with the people on my t.v. set.
Maybe it goes back to where I began. To Murray, and Anderson's movies, and their mutual, unspoken agreement that life is filled with unusual coincidences and longings.
Bill Murray is a real, honest-to-goodness human being. (I know, because I was the biggest fan of Meatballs and Stripes in the world, and when I was fifteen or sixteen I convinced my dad to take me and my friends to Camp White Pine while we were in Haliburton, Ontario, because it was there that Meatballs had been filmed fifteen years before, and just the fact that we drove along the same road leading to the cottages that Murray had trod upon many summers ago was enough to make my day, month, year, enough to solidify once and for all that Murray was flesh and blood, had walked the same earth as me. And, incidentally, if you haven't seen Stripes, or even Meatballs, you must. This is Bill Murray in pure, crystalline form. The Murray in Rushmore is the Murray of Stripes twenty years later, the wiseass engulfed by the drudgery of life who yearns and learns to smirk and feel once more.) And yet Murray marches to his own drum. So does Anderson. In fact, it's not even a drum they march to, no, but another, unfamiliar instrument only they can hear.
When you watch their movies, so much is intrinsically offbeat and skewed; so much is angular. But there's a rhythm to their off-rhythm beat, a recognition of our need for connection and empathy. Murray is not sentimental, and neither is Anderson, but boy can they taunt and toy with emotion; man can they hint at what makes us puny humans love and need each other so muchy.
It's in Murray's smile, I think. He wields it like a knife. He doesn't smile often, and he doesn't do it easily, but when he does, what you see is humanity shining through. You see goodness. You see his smarm and cynicism about life that is his trademark stripped clean. It's a wink to the audience, a nod to the good will we can still summon through the dark.
Overanalyzing? Of course. When you're dealing with people as complex and heightened and enlightened as Bill Murray and Wes Anderson, you can't help but examine life differently. You can't help but wonder whether our own individual versions of the world will somehow, someday resemble theirs, of if they sometimes already do.
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