the razor's edge

There’s a scene in Pee Wee’s Great Adventure where the gregarious “Pee-Wee” is lost. He’s in the backlot of the studio that’s set to produce the feature-film of his life, but, still embroiled in the drama that is his life, and not in the image of it, he’s also trying to evade the police, win back Dotty, and careen out of the film so he can watch it himself. Plot aside, grey-suited Pee-Wee flits in and out of film sets, jiggling his hips as a beach-blanket-bingo girl, nudging aviators over the bridge of his nose as a stoic bodyguard, and generally playing each role perfectly, before something minor goes wrong, and his momentary presence wastes reels, wreaks havoc, and propels him to the next self-contained candy-colored world.

Like the fictional character Pee-Wee within his own film, Bill Murray, the actor, is treated by filmgoers as something more than an actor, fitting his body into the shapes of other characters, flitting among sets, but always retaining that essential Bill Murray spike. He’s box-office-irrresistable as an actor because he fills only ostensibly the cardboard names of characters he’s been assigned to fill: Phils and Larrys and Bobs, whose cutout words are the flat terrain upon which the cities of Murray’s improvisation are destined to rise. Simply put, despite the changing marquees, the rotating painted sets, the costume changes, Mr. Murray, like Pee-Wee, always plays himself. If we laugh at Pee-Wee fumbling with a sandy hula hoop, we laugh at the absurdity of the scenario: a suited lunatic, playing the part of a beauty queen! It’s the same chuckle moviegoers could have gleaned from a screening of The Razor’s Edge if they hadn’t been so snooty.

Instead, the period drama, co-written and co-directed by the muse himself, in which Mr. Murray plays “Larry,” a World War 1 ambulance driver caught up in an affair with a wealthy Chicago maiden that’s leading him straight to where he doesn’t want to go—a predictable marriage in a predictable world. Murray is as miscast as anyone ever was: sallow smoker’s cheeks speckle a boy supposedly straight out of college. An older woman grasps the slightly-balding jokester’s face before he sets out for war, feeling the skin like Braille: “Don’t hurt your pretty little face, my dear.” After the war, Murray seeks out adventure as a fisherman in France, a coal miner in Britain, and a monk in Tibet. Now, pause. Please imagine the hound-dog SNL actor in these three scenarios.

1. As a fisherman in France, he lounges in suspenders in his cramped apartment straight out of Moulin Rouge, wherein he reads books constantly, and frequents diseased prostitutes.

2. As a coal-miner, he dines with a mining family, his face covered in obviously-makeuped “soot,” as he rubs a rag upon his head, speaking of adventure.

3. As a Tibetan monk, Murray climbs the tallest peak, led there by a squire, and jostles the locals in a marketplace, picking up the melons they’re selling, holding them to his chest, and squeezing them like fictional breasts. Oh, that seems like the Murray we recognize!

Murray, unlike the majority of actors working today, has a character so suited to our contemporary conscience, so tuned in to the radio dial of modernity, that he seems completely unfitting to live life in any other period. He reeks of a disillusionment that seems out of place anywhere outside the 80s. This movie was a complete flop because the acting is objectively terrible. But if one were to step outside the idea of a movie, to see Murray as what he is—the pure embodiment of the disillusioned modern conscience—then we might be able to see this film as just another painted set in his twist with cinema, in his motorcyle chase out of here. See Murray as a Pee Wee, scrambling over wet rocks, aching in a world that is not his own, and you will not only understand what it is to love this movie—you will understand what it is to be a movie.