He got his start on Saturday Night Live and made his big-screen bones on a succession of comedies that traded heavily on his easygoing, wisecracking charm — then kicked off the second phase of his film career by sublimating all that charm in a series of roles that took a less-is-more approach to exploring his dramatic side, and earned the best reviews of his career in the process. Most actors wouldn’t be able to pull off that kind of transition (see: Carrey, Jim), but then, most actors aren’t blessed with equal chops on either side of the funny line. Bill Murray, on the other hand, owns that line — and with his latest film, City of Ember, opening today, we here at RT thought there was no better time to take a look back at some of his best performances. After all, you never know when he’s going to take another prolonged break from filmmaking, right? Get ready to laugh, cry, and pretend Garfield never existed.
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15. Meatballs (1979)  Tomatometer: 71% Ah, the summer camp movie. It’s a genre that’s long since been bled dry — and it’s always provoked a gag reflex in critics — but once upon a time, comedies about sex-starved teenagers running wild at camp were all the rage, and 1979’s Meatballs was one of the first (and, not coincidentally, best). While it certainly isn’t Murray’s finest 90 minutes, it does have plenty of solid humor and light charm to go with all the hormonal antics, and it offers an interesting early glimpse at the development of Murray, screenwriter Harold Ramis, and director Ivan Reitman. (If you haven’t seen it in awhile, Meatballs is especially fascinating as an example of what passed for raunchy in 1979.) Although the franchise went on to suffer grevious misuse — Meatballs II featured an alien, Meatballs III is something Patrick Dempsey would probably dearly love to forget, and the fourth installment starred Corey Feldman and was released direct to DVD — the original is, as Dennis Schwartz of Ozus’ World Movie Reviews put it, “As easy to handle as drinking lemonade under a shady tree.” |
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14. Mad Dog and Glory (1993) Tomatometer: 72%One of Murray’s more unusual (and lesser-seen) roles came in this love story/dramedy hybrid, which found both Murray and Robert De Niro playing against type: Murray as a Mob boss (and aspiring stand-up comedian), and De Niro as the meek, bottled-up police detective who saves his life and “earns” the temporary, uh, use of a prostitute named Glory (played by Uma Thurman). As you might imagine, Mad Dog and Glory had a bit of a balancing act to pull off, and according to most critics, it wasn’t always successful. Although many writers expressed pleasant surprise at the suddenly commercial turn from director Richard McNaughton (then best known for his work on Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), and praised the typically sharp dialogue in Richard Price’s script, ultimately, most critics felt that Mad Dog‘s many shifts in style and tone were too much to completely overcome. Still, its stars earned high marks for their out-of-character performances; Time Out’s Derek Adams, for one, noted that “De Niro seems committed to the part of the sensitive loner, while Murray all but succeeds in mixing smooth and sinister, heartfelt and hot-tempered.” |
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13. Caddyshack (1980) Tomatometer: 76%There are probably more eminently quotable movies from the early ’80s, but not many, and none of them boast the iconic performance of Bill Murray as the mumbling, borderline psychotic groundskeeper/groundhog battler Carl Spackler. Despite being only one member of a very funny ensemble cast that includes Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, and Ted Knight, Murray essentially walked away with the movie, thanks in part to an oft-quoted (and totally improvised) monologue involving the Dalai Lama and the immortal phrase “So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.” Thanks to a hilarious script and an impressive run at the box office, Caddyshack went on to become one of the most influential films of the ’80s, at least in terms of inspiring scores of similarly raunchy (but unfailingly inferior) teen comedies, but critics mostly turned up their noses at the time — and although the film’s stature has grown in the last 28 years, their slowly building respect is still expressed grudgingly: DVDTown’s John J. Puccio spoke for many of his peers when he said it has “very few saving graces,” but admitted that he harbors “a guilty pleasure in watching it, at least in bits and pieces.” |
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12. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) Tomatometer: 80%What, you thought Rushmore was quirky? Sucker. With his next movie, Wes Anderson proved that was just a warm-up act: The Royal Tenenbaums takes offbeat character studies to a whole new level, making the Coen brothers seem like staid conformists in comparison. Here, Anderson takes an unwieldy cast — including Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Danny Glover, Luke and Owen Wilson, and, of course, Bill Murray — and wrangles them into a suitably convoluted plot involving the scheming patriarch of the oddball Tenenbaum clan. As cuckolded neurologist Raleigh St. Clair, Murray doesn’t carry a great deal of the film’s weight on his shoulders, but one could argue that his typically subtle performance (summed up beautifully in the scene where he learns of his wife’s various marital transgressions) helps anchor a movie constantly in danger of floating right off the rails. It wasn’t a huge hit at the box office, but like Rushmore, it enjoyed largely positive reviews and has continued to build a following on the home market. Although critics had their issues with Tenenbaums, most of them agreed with the Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, who said “Whatever my qualms, it’s still one of the funniest comedies around.” |
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11. What About Bob? (1991) Tomatometer: 81%Bill Murray has always excelled at playing unflappable slackers, while nobody can handle the role of an uptight fussbudget with quite the aplomb of Richard Dreyfuss — which meant that pitting them against each other in 1991’s What About Bob? was virtually a guarantee of critical and commercial success. Fortunately for fans of progressively over-the-top comedy, the movie basically delivered on that guarantee — although it’s perhaps not as consistently hilarious as some of Murray’s truly classic comedies, it went down as easily one of the funniest films of the year. What About Bob? boasts some of Frank Oz’s lightest direction, which is truly saying something, but it makes sense; all he had to do, really, was let the cameras — and Murray and Dreyfuss — run with their characters. Murray’s Bob is a well-meaning soul whose many phobias prevents him from living a normal life — or from allowing his psychiatrist to take the vacation he’s been craving. As that psychiatrist, Dreyfuss is at his sputtering, bug-eyed best, and together, the duo transcends what was by then already a very tired plot (and, it must be said, a patently ridiculous final act). What it boils down to is a very funny film — one, in the words of FulvueDrive-in’s Chuck O’Leary, “made even more amusing by the fact that Murray and Dreyfuss couldn’t stand each other in real life.” |
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10. Quick Change (1990) Tomatometer: 84%Bill Murray as a burned-out bureaucrat who disguises himself as a clown to lead a motley crew on a bank robbery — only to find his escape blocked by a seemingly endless series of mishaps delivered by the gridlock and innumerable misfits of New York City. Even now, Quick Change‘s synopsis sounds like a surefire recipe for box office success, but in spite of mostly positive reviews, Murray’s (co-)directorial debut went down as one of 1990’s highest-profile flops, grossing less than $16 million during its theatrical run. It isn’t a particularly ambitious film (Steve Crum of Dispatch-Tribune Newspapers summed it up as “funny fluff”), and most critics agreed that it doesn’t boast one of Murray’s finest performances, but Quick Change has held up well thanks to a stellar supporting cast that the filmmakers had the good sense to highlight, including Jason Robards, Phil Hartman, Stanley Tucci, and Tony Shalhoub (the latter two would go on to star together in the critically acclaimed, and equally box office-starved, Big Night). Murray stepped behind the camera for Quick Change after he and screenwriter Howard Franklin, who worked from Jay Cronley’s book, decided they were too close to the material to hand it over to anyone else — but it would seem that what Murray really wants to do is not direct: this remains his sole directorial credit. |
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9. Rushmore (1998) Tomatometer: 86%The second act of Murray’s career, in which he pivots from playing sleepy-eyed shysters into more finely nuanced dramatic roles, starts with this film, which broke director Wes Anderson through to a larger audience, essentially redefined the quirky high school movie for a new generation and reaped scores of awards and nominations for its trouble. Though it was never anything close to a box office hit — its gross stalled at just over $17 million, below its $20 million budget — Rushmore has grown into a certified cult classic. The movie rests on Schwartzman’s shoulders, and a good deal of the critical acclaim rightly centered on his turn as the troubled Max Fischer — but for a not-inconsiderable number of critics, Murray’s performance as the dissatisfied executive who befriends, then spars with Schwartzman was a revelation. While lauding Schwartzman as “the best underdog since Cusack in Better Off Dead,” eFilmCritic’s Brian McKay saved his highest praise for Murray, deeming this “the finest, funniest, and most deadpan performance of his career.” |
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8. Broken Flowers (2005) Tomatometer: 86%By this point, Murray was becoming just as famous for his hard-to-decipher real-life antics as he was for anything he did on screen — at least partly because anyone who wanted to hire him had no agent or manager to go through, and was forced to deal directly with Murray, supposedly through an oft-neglected personal voicemail box. True to form, for Broken Flowers — and a part which director Jim Jarmusch said he wrote more or less specifically for his star — Murray agreed to sign on only if he could stay within 60 miles of his home. Ironically, Flowers is a movie about traveling — Murray’s character visits former flames in an effort to determine which one sent him an anonymous letter informing him of the nearly 20-year-old product of their relationship. As much as his character spent the film in motion, Murray kept his performance close to home, delivering a quiet, minimalistic turn not terribly dissimilar from his work in Lost in Translation. The similarity was noted by more than one critic, and although Flowers didn’t attract the same sort of attention as Translation, but most scribes agreed with Sight and Sound’s Liese Spencer, who noted, “After a career of deadpanning, Murray’s impassive performance is still fresh, funny, sympathetic and restrained.” |
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7. Tootsie (1982) Tomatometer: 87%It’s got Stephen Bishop on the soundtrack and it takes place during an era in which soap opera stars had a somewhat realistic chance of appearing on the cover of mainstream publications — but despite these anachronisms, Tootsie remains largely as fresh and funny as it was in 1982. And although it would be at best misguided to give Bill Murray a large portion of the credit for this, his scene-stealing, unbilled turn as Dustin Hoffman’s playwright roommate did give a terrific early indication of Murray’s willingness — eagerness, even — to take on smaller roles in the right projects. It’s easy to see why Murray might have wanted to show up and film a few days of Tootsie, too: with Dustin Hoffman in the lead, Sydney Pollack behind the cameras, and a script whose writers included Barry Levinson and Elaine May, it was a pretty sweet gig whether or not your name ended up above the title. As an added bonus, the movie’s examination of gender roles fit perfectly with the times, helping propel Tootsie to nearly $175 million in receipts and plenty of glowing reviews from critics like Emanuel Levy, who called it “one of the best and most significant comedies of the 1980s.” |
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6. Stripes (1981) Tomatometer: 88%Anyone who’s ever struggled to get a film off the ground will read this and weep: Ivan Reitman dreamed up the premise for Stripes — “Cheech and Chong in the Army” — on the way to the premiere for Meatballs, after which he pitched his idea to Paramount, where it was instantly greenlit. Of course, it wasn’t all peaches and cream for Stripes — Cheech and Chong bailed after being denied complete creative control — but once Bill Murray and Harold Ramis were subbed in for the cheeba-loving duo (whose personae were ultimately boiled down into Judge Reinhold’s character, Elmo), the studio had an entirely different, but still quite profitable, movie on its hands. As John Winger, the slacker who joins the Army to get fit and meet chicks, Murray was essentially playing a finely tweaked version of his public persona, and the script (by Ramis, Len Blum, and Daniel Goldberg) was filled with zippy one-liners; as a result, although Stripes isn’t what you’d call a filmmaking achievement, it’s classic early Murray, and it’s nothing but entertaining. Roger Ebert agreed, calling it “a celebration of all that is irreverent, reckless, foolhardy, undisciplined, and occasionally scatological” — and “a lot of fun.” |
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5. Little Shop of Horrors (1986) Tomatometer: 91%We like to think that turning movies into musicals — and then back into movies — is a new trend, borne of the ever-dwindling capital in Hollywood’s creative reserves, but Frank Oz’s 1986 cult classic followed the same path as the recent big-screen revivals of The Producers and Hairspray. Oz adapted the off-Broadway version of the story, as written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, which was in turn inspired by the (low-budget, natch) 1960 Roger Corman film of the same name. Fittingly for a film that predated the wave of screen-to-stage-to-screen projects, Little Shop of Horrors was a movie ahead of its time: It arrived during a period when musicals were in such short supply that moviegoers seemed not to know what to do with one, and despite a funny, colorful ad campaign in support of the funny, colorful movie, Little Shop ended up not doing much more than making back its budget. Those who saw it, however, latched onto its inspired bits — including Bill Murray’s turn as the masochistic patient of Steve Martin’s sadistic dentist — and it’s gone on to build quite the devoted following in the two decades-plus since its release. As TIME Magazine’s Richard Corliss noted upon its release, Little Shop “sneaks up on you, about as subtly as Aubrey II.” |
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4. Ed Wood (1994) Tomatometer: 91%It’s a biopic about one of the least talented filmmakers in history, it was scripted by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the duo behind the Problem Child movies, and director Michael Lehmann (Hudson Hawk) was originally attached to direct. Yes, things could have turned out very differently for Ed Wood, but when Tim Burton walked away from Mary Reilly and took an interest in directing Alexander and Karaszewski’s script, the project took another turn. (Lehmann, undaunted, went on to direct Airheads.) The final product represented a departure for many of the parties involved: Burton scaled back his signature visual style, filming in black and white and letting the story do the talking, and much of the cast — Sarah Jessica Parker, for example — found itself in uncharted territory. Appearing as Bunny Breckinridge, the flamboyant star of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Murray continued the string of smaller, occasionally offbeat roles he’d occasionally sought out since taking a break from acting following the failure of The Razor’s Edge in 1984. It also presaged a period in which Murray would begin choosing scripts seemingly at random, but in Ed Wood he picked a project that, in the words of Time Out’s Geoff Andrew, “certainly succeeds as a funny, touching tribute to tenacity, energy, ambition and friendship.” |
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3. Ghostbusters (1984) Tomatometer: 93%No film makes it to the screen as it’s originally envisioned by its writers, but Ghostbusters took a particularly circuitous journey: Originally, Dan Aykroyd planned to assemble it as a project for himself and John Belushi, with all sorts of big-budget shenanigans, and supporting roles for Eddie Murphy and John Candy. It was only after a ground-up rewrite by Aykroyd and Harold Ramis that Ghostbusters became the box office behemoth it was destined to be, racking up an an astounding $238 million tally throughout 1984 and 1985. Though it’s very much an ensemble comedy, many of the film’s best lines are stolen by Murray, perhaps helping create the legend that he didn’t really read the script, and improvised most of what his character said onscreen. This story is probably apocryphal, but no matter who put the words in his mouth, Murray’s deadpan delivery was perfect for the role, and cemented his status as the thinking man’s preeminent smart-aleck of the ’80s; it also helped sway begrudging critics like the Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr, who summed up Ghostbusters as “not at all a bad time, thanks mainly to…Murray’s incredibly dry line readings.” |
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2. Lost in Translation (2003) Tomatometer: 95%Thanks to her much-derided appearance in The Godfather III, Sofia Coppola was still the butt of many film fans’ jokes when she helmed Lost in Translation — but all that changed once the glowing reviews started pouring in, capped off with her Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. But Coppola wasn’t the only one who earned praise for this quiet little picture; Murray received some of the best reviews of his career (not to mention a Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award) for his softly melancholic portrayal of a movie star whose crushing ennui has set him adrift in a sea of unfulfilling relationships and paycheck projects. He’s oh-so-gently jolted from his reverie by a fellow unhappy traveler played by Scarlett Johansson — and who can blame him? — but that’s pretty much all that happens here, something pointed out by the handful of critics who gave Lost in Translation unfavorable ratings. For the 95 percent of critics who loved it, though, Translation was something special; Variety’s David Rooney spoke for many when he said its “balance of humor and poignancy makes it both a pleasurable and melancholy experience.” |
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1. Groundhog Day (1993) Tomatometer: 96%For a modest little comedy that failed to break $100 million at the box office during its theatrical run, Groundhog Day has done pretty well for itself in the 15 years since its release: It’s been added to the United States Film Registry, ranked in the top 40 of the AFI and Bravo “100 Funniest Movies” lists, the top 10 of AFI’s fantasy list, and lauded by Roger Ebert in his “Great Movies” series. The film catches Murray in transition, navigating between the arch, manic style of his earlier films and the more minimalistic, restrained humor of later projects — and he’s aided capably by a smartly funny script from Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis, the latter of whom provides some of his best, lightest direction here. Much like the day Murray’s misanthropic newscaster is forced to relive in the movie, Groundhog Day benefits from repeated viewings, and this is largely due to Murray’s deft performance; in the words of TIME’s Richard Corliss, he “makes the movie a comic time warp that anyone should be happy to get stuck in.” |
