Word: murrayism
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...great comedians begin their career leading audiences around by the nose, but over the years, one of two things tends to happen: the comedian either self-destructs (as in the case of Murray's fellow Second City alums John Belushi and Chris Farley) or, worse, the power shifts, and the comedian finds himself chasing after the audience. "There are a lot of people in this field who are extraordinarily needy," says Lorne Michaels, executive producer and a creator of Saturday Night Live. "It's a very hard thing not to give an audience what they want...
...wisdom of that strategy has recently become self-evident. While Eddie Murphy toils in kids' movies, Steve Martin keeps remaking his remake of Father of the Bride and Robin Williams plays psychopaths as restitution for the saccharine sins of his Patch Adams period, Murray has not only remained funny but has transcended funny. The man who taught a generation how to rebel with a smirk in Meatballs, Stripes and Ghostbusters has forsaken easy laughs and giant paychecks to play a series of sad, complicated characters like Herman Blume, the lonely industrialist in Anderson's Rushmore; Bob Harris, the fading movie...
...process, Murray has redefined himself as an Oscar-nominated actor unrivaled at portraying middle-aged regret. At the same time, he has become something like the new Harvey Keitel but with a bigger paycheck--the favorite star of a generation of distinctive and mostly younger filmmakers, including Anderson, Coppola and Jim Jarmusch, who will direct Murray's next film, a still untitled project set for release later this year. For directors like those, Murray's inwardness, his air of wounded integrity, his sheer, irreducible strangeness operate as correlatives for their originality as filmmakers. And Murray in turn can sometimes lead...
...Murray knows that all this means he has reached an enviable career sweet spot. "I don't know. I'm ready to die, I guess," he says in a parody of earnestness. "But, yeah, I get it. Things have come around, and my way of operating has turned out to be great for me, and people seem to trust my stuff. It's cool to have proved that you can have what you want without selling yourself completely to hell. Jeez, I'm really crowing...
...obstreperous to sit still and be deconstructed, but after a long day of promoting The Life Aquatic in interviews for local newspapers from around the country, Murray, with a glass of Scotch in his hand and an empty New York City hotel suite at his disposal, seems relaxed. Not just for the moment but in life. Even his failure to win a 2004 Oscar for Lost in Translation was, he insists, no big deal. (As a spoof of his supposed disappointment over losing the Best Actor award to Sean Penn, Murray appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman...