What About Bob?

For one of our most beloved comedic actors, Bill Murray didn't make very many funny movies.  Caddyshack?  Stripes?  Ghostbusters?  All bad films.  (And the stakes in Groundhog Day are too high for it to be considered a comedy.) Part of the problem is that Murray's heyday was in the execrable '80s, probably the only decade in which Chevy Chase could have become a movie star. But some of the challenge stemmed from the nature of Murray's weirdo deadpan persona.  He's an odd sort to build a movie around.  When faced with a calamity, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, or Will Ferrell throw a tantrum.  Murray just shrugs his shoulders.

The genius of What About Bob? is that it takes the things everybody likes about Bill Murray and amplifies them.  He's the offbeat guy everyone wants to be around.  But his neuroses have also been cranked up to 11, and that serves as the engine for the plot.  He stalks his psychiatrist, played by a razor-sharp Richard Dreyfuss, but he's so nice about it that his shrink is the only one who seems bothered.  The film slowly becomes an adult version of Looney Tunes, with Dreyfuss' Elmer Fudd going to increasingly desperate lengths to get rid of Murray's Bugs Bunny.  His efforts to "get rid of" Bob become more literal as the movie goes along, giving the film a dark edge that helps prevent it from slipping into sentimentality.

The ending also helps in this regard.  Unlike Planes, Trains, and Automobiles--another comedy about a lovable loser with a finale smothered in Cheez-Wiz--What About Bob? never redeems Dreyfuss as the straight man.  It's content to subtly show that we may have something to learn from "crazy" people.  That the "sane" ones might not be so stable after all.