Bowfinger Review
by Stephen Graham Jones (lisgj AT LIB DOT TTU DOT EDU)October 5th, 1999
Steve Martin is at his best when his character is trying to sell something not really worth buying. See his silver-tongued evangelist in Leap of Faith, a character both reprehensible and sympathetic, the endearing used car salesman. Eddie Murphy's at his best when allowed to do variations on his always-one-step-ahead -of-you-and talking-twice-as-fast Axel Foley. In Bowfinger--written by Steve Martin--both of these actors get to be at their best: Steve Martin as the title-character--Hollywood outsider/ occasional filmmaker Bowfinger--and Eddie Murphy as Kit Ramsey, eccentric action star. And, importantly, they get to be at their best in their own scenes. As with Dinero and Pacino in Heat, Bowfinger and Kit Ramsey are hardly ever on-screen together, meaning heavyweights Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy don't get in each other's way, which gives each whatever creative room they might need.
Too, though, there's Eddie Murphy's other character, Jiff, the lookalike stand-in Bowfinger recruits when Kit Ramsey refuses to star in Bowfinger's picture "Chubby Rain." Jiff isn't a variation on Axel Foley. More a variation on the Jerry Lewis-type character Eddie Murphy's been playing of late. Because Jiff isn't Eddie Murphy at his best with Jiff, he and Steve Martin's Bowfinger can be on-screen together. There's even room for Heather Graham, Christine Baranski, Jamie Kennedy, Terrence Stamp (not in his The Hunger persona) some walk-throughs by Robert Downey Jr, etc. Holding them all together too is a near-brilliant writing job: the premise of Bowfinger is that if Kit Ramsey won't be in Chubby Rain willingly, then he'll be in it unwillingly--or, unwittingly, via Bowfinger's cast approaching him on the street and running lines, all of this surreptitiously caught on film. If left at this, Bowfinger would be merely clever, but then Steve Martin takes it one step further, makes Kit Ramsey's 'alien' paranoia dramatically dovetail with the script for Chubby Rain, which in turn makes kit Ramsey more and more dependent upon his 'therapist' at MindHead (a thinly veiled Scientology), which is exactly the kind of domino-action a comedy needs.
And then there's Frank Oz directing, doing everything right, working in probably 80% of the exposition without dialogue, as in the Rockford Files opening, where, by the time the camera gets to Bowfinger, we already know him and his type: that, because he's existed at the fringe, never succeeded, he thus deserves to succeed. Bowfinger is, after all, a Cinderella-story, a structure familiar enough to us that Steve Martin can get a little fantastic with it and not lose us altogether.
However familiar, though, the structure and the writing can't quite hide the occasionally inconsistent humor, the absurdist moments when someone made the decision to go for the compulsive laugh when this isn't a movie about the compulsive laugh. It's more akin to Rushmoore, or, talking Steve Martin, LA Story. Also painfully apparent is how unnecessary Jiff is to the development of Bowfinger. Yes, a clown character was needed there, but there's no reason for Eddie Murphy to play two roles for it. Granted, it looked good in the trailer, it worked in the first Austin Powers and it was what Dead Ringers was all about, but more often than not, one actor with two roles is either a glitzy hindrance or overcorrection for a weak story. And Steve Martin didn't write a weak story here, meaning Jiff just slows things down, or, provides the plausible excuse for the plot to lurch forward when it really had enough momentum that it was going to lurch regardless. Other than that, though, Bowfinger is about as close to flawless as it gets, right down to the spoof-ending (every martial arts movie), which, while eerily reminiscent of a similar scene in Half-Baked, is, like everything else in Bowfinger, somehow just a little better.
(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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