Therapy Week: What About Bob? (1992)

2 years ago

Therapy Week: What About Bob? (1992)

IS THIS SOME RADICAL NEW THERAPY, DOCTOR?

by Letitia Trent

My first pre-teen love was not the New Kids on the Block, Vanilla Ice, Rico Suave, or any of those other “bad boys” of Top 40 radio whose images were plastered all over the inside covers of my classmates’ Lisa Frank notebooks. No, my first love was Bill Murray - particularly the Bill Murray of Ghostbusters, What About Bob, and Groundhog Day. Until Morrissey stole my heart in the mid-nineties, Bill Murray was my secret crush.

My family rented What About Bob? soon after it came out in 1992 — a rarity in our house, as my mother didn’t like contemporary movies unless they were devoid of all mentions of sex, all presence of blondes and female nudity, and, preferably, involved wild animals, horses, or violent revenge-fantasies (her favorite movies being Walking Tall and I Spit on Your Grave). With her very particular tastes, I’m suprised I ever managed to see this movie at all. I can imagine myself now in the Heatrshorne, Oklahoma video shop, clutching the enormous plastic case that contained the VHS copy of What About Bob?, begging her not to make me watch yet another Death Wish sequel.

In Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters, and Scrooged, Bill Murray plays lecherous, slippery, smart-ass characters with a strange mix of self-deprication and confidence. In What About Bob?, we get something slightly different - a character much more like his mentally-challenged groundskeeper in Caddyshack (minus the perversion and plus a few dozen IQ points) than his other well-known late-eighties and early nineties roles.

When we first meet Bob, he seems to suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder and a multitude of phobias. He also seems to have zero self-awareness or awareness of others - he’s clingy, he’s dependent, and he has apparently driven his previous psychiatrist insane with the constant claims on his time and attention. So, after the exit of his previous psychiatrist, Bob is handed over to Dr. Leo Martin (Richard Dreyfus), a successful author and, most importantly for the movie, a jerk - the kind of guy who makes his family watch him model blazers in front of the mantle for his five-minute segment on Good Morning America.

After his first meeting with Bob, Leo anounces that he’ll be going on vacation for a month and that Bob should read his bestseller, Baby Steps, while he is away. Of course, Bob isn’t able to make it through even a couple of days without a doctor’s constant supervision, and eventually ends up tracking down Leo and his family in New Hampshire, much to Leo’s horror. Bob quickly ends up almost moving in, a turn of events that Leo can’t seem to counter without revealing himself to be the petty, selfish person that he doesn’t want anyone to know he really is.

Leo is the classic “bad shrink” - he’s imperious and cold to his patients, self-centered, and completely unable to see his own flaws. Dreyfus plays the character without any redeeming characteristics, which makes it easier to hate him (the movie seems to hate not only him, but psychiatrists and rich people in general). Bob, too, is a familiar staple - the lovable crazy. Although he seems to start out as just a very needy hyper-neurotic, he eventually morphs into a kind of idiot saint, an unstable person so lovable and appreciative of any modicum of attention that he captures everybody’s heart. The funny thing about this, though, is that it’s Bill Murray playing the lovable obsessive-compulsive, so it’s hard to tell exactly how much of Bob’s clingy, crazy-making ingratiation is honest.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is one of Murray’s best performances, but it’s certainly one of his more perplexing - and figuring out what the hell Murray is doing is often half the fun. Some people might remember Robert Ebert’s strange review of Scrooged, where he criticized Murray for creating one of the most “depressing” re-tellings of “A Christmas Carol” in the history of cinema. He claimed that the main character’s supposed change of heart at the end reads more like a “mental breakdown” than a celebration of Christmas spirit. Murray’s performance in What About Bob? has a similiar ambiguity. Although Leo is the asshole here (or at least the one we are supposed to like the least), it’s hard not to sympathize with his increasing frustration when nobody in his family seems to realize how absolutely grating and crazy Bob actually is. As Leo starts to fall off the deep end, and Bob continues to grovel at his feet and compliment him on his greatness, the viewer begins to wonder if Bob is some kind of mad genius — is he trying to reveal Leo’s self-centredness by politely driving him insane? Is the movie meanly rejoicing in Leo ending up catatonic in a wheelchair as Bob marries his sister?

As always, Bill Murray’s curious performance is more interesting than almost everything else that happens onscreen. He sometimes seems completely disconnected from the movie at hand, acting in his own little bubble of strangeness, much like Johnny Depp in the otherwise unwatchable Pirates of the Carribbean movies. Bob is in turns aggressive and needy, sensitive and unaware, over-emotive and deadpan. Although Bill Murray’s new persona has given us some amazing movies, I miss the unpredictability of the old Bill Murray, the guy who seemed to be making fun of himself and everyone else while smack-dab in the middle of a big Hollywood movie. The absurdity and underlying meanness of What About Bob? fits Murray’s strengths — even as viewers, we don’t know if he’s laughing with us or at us.