William James “Bill” Murray is a philosopher worthy of his namesake. A major moment in the development of his thought occurred in 1982, just after his then wife, Margaret “Mickey” Kelly, had given birth to their first child, Homer. A friend of Mickey’s, the film director John Byrum, visited her in the hospital while she was recovering from the delivery. He gave her a book, perhaps to lighten, or enlighten, her convalescence. It was Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. Byrum was thinking of making a film based on the book and so of risking a remake of the 1946 cinematic version, starring a war-weary Tyrone Power and the exquisite Gene Tierney, who was still fresh from Laura (in which she became a painting) and before her mental breakdowns of the fifties.
The next day Byrum was awakened by a phone call at 4:00 a.m. A man on the line said, “This is Larry, Larry Darrell.” Like so many other actors who began as comics, such as John Belushi and Steve Martin, Murray wanted to play more dramatic roles. In this novel he had no doubt found on his tired wife’s hospital bedstand was the perfect part. Byrum perhaps suspected Murray would be interested in portraying Darrell. (Why else would he have given the book to Mickey?) The director immediately cast Murray, and the two set off on a road trip across the United States, hoping to develop a script. They succeeded. The movie was soon financed by Columbia, reluctantly, since the company doubted the story’s box-office potential. Murray had to promise to star in the studio’s Ghostbusters to seal the deal.
Columbia was right to be skeptical: on a twelve-million-dollar budget, the film netted only six; it also received mostly negative reviews. One reason the film bombed, possibly the only reason: Larry Darrell’s quest for enlightenment was rather undramatic because Bill Murray was already enlightened.
The light is there already, in his first recurring SNL character, Nick the Lounge Singer, performed consistently from 1977 to 1981. The man is a parody of the small-time seventies lounge singer: silk-shirted; gold-medallioned; mesotalented; hyperschmaltzy yet knowing it and weary of the role; torqueing easy listening standards into perky-weird medleys, mash-ups, and improvs; a low-grade Bobby Vinton; annoying and sweet at once, with charming earnestness and too-resilient-won’t-shut-the-fuck-up–ness; chatting up the audience with painfully phony “and who do we have here?” talk; frequenter of low-traffic nightclubs, airport bars, Catskills ski lodges, and, in Nick’s case, train car bars and, when really down on luck, prisons, knowing that retirement homes might be in his increasingly miserable future. What Murray brought to Nick the Lounge Singer was a compelling blend of desperate commitment (he is a loser) and a melancholy detachment that conveys “I know this is ridiculous and sad, but who really cares in this world in which nothing is not ridiculous and sad? Look, you can see it in my raised eyebrows, my eyes slightly askance, twinkling with my recognition of what you’re thinking—this is pitiful—and acknowledging it, and even celebrating it, the cheesy sordidness, because it is kind of funny, in a way, and we might as well laugh instead of cry since it doesn’t matter what we do.”
The late Timothy White put this idea nicely in his 1988 piece “The Rumpled Anarchy of Bill Murray”: the “quintessential Bill Murray portrayal has the actor simultaneously immersed in his role and commenting drolly on it.” This tension between text and marginal note distinguished Murray from the spontaneous, unpredictable Belushi and the Ackroyd who could disappear entirely into his characters. Murray would, White continues, “permit viewers to see the actual process of assuming a character’s essence—and the nakedness of the effort was startling.”