Bill Murray

Some would argue that Bill Murray came of age as an actor in “Lost in Translation”.  Playing a variation on himself, Murray is perfect as a self-loathing, washed up Hollywood star making some money on the side in Japan fronting a whiskey commercial.  The connection he makes with Scarlett Johansson’s neglected wife is all the more touching for stopping short of romance, for the film isn’t anything as obvious as an older man/younger woman melodrama.

Murray’s performance in “Lost in Translation” is raw and open as never before yet he retains his trademark irony and innate comic timing.  As a critic once pointed out, Murray shares with Groucho Marx the ability to be at once a character within a film and a comedian mocking it, one complicit with the audience in his understanding that the movies are an artificial construct not to be taken at all seriously.

Murray’s style so transcends his material that he is largely impervious to bad scripts.  Emerging with a reputation intact after early dross like “Meatballs” and “Caddyshack”,  he single-handedly made the “Ghostbusters” films watchable.  “Groundhog Day” was the first feature to suggest hidden emotional depths, the tale of a cynic forced to relive a single day over and over until he discovers the joy of life.

Parts thereafter showed an artist full of confidence and keen on expanding his range.   Three roles which followed were masterful: the transgendered Bunny Breckinridge in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” demonstrated Murray’s camp side as never before, the egotistical bowler ‘Big Ern’ McCracken in the Farrelly brothers’ “Kingpin” deserved Oscar recognition, and his politically conflicted if romantic ventriloquist in Tim Robbin’s “The Cradle Will Rock” was sadly underrated.

Murray’s three films with Jim Jarmusch are noteworthy, especially “Broken Flowers”. His most sustained creative partnership though has been with writer-director Wes Anderson, in heart breaking cameos (the cuckolded husband in “The Royal Tenenbaums”), witty supporting roles (the world weary businessman in “Rushmore”) and finely detailed leading parts (the morally bankrupt Jacques Cousteau wannabe in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”).