Bill Murray made What About Bob? in 1991, two years after Ghostbusters II and two years before Groundhog Day. Richard Dreyfus, his co-star, was one year on from Postcards from the Edge and on a run including Lost in Yonkers (1993) and Mr Holland’s Opus (1995). Director Frank Oz’s previous two movies had been Little Shop of Horrors and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
They’re not all classics but they’re at least all decent movies. And yet What About Bob? didn’t quite get the attention it deserved. A comedy with these names attached might have expected a review in the New York Times, for example. There wasn’t one. Nor did Roger Ebert, the US’s most influential critic, bother reviewing it in the Chicago Sun-Times.
Odd, because it’s a big crowd-pleasing newspaper-baiting entertainment, with Bill Murray playing an incredibly multiply-phobic and terrifyingly needy patient and Dreyfus as his shrink, an uptight and ambitious man appalled to discover that Bob (Murray) has followed him out of the city to the idyllic town where he’s vacationing with his family for a month.
Here, in scenes reminiscent of The Pink Panther, hopeless Bob will harrass the increasingly maddened Dr Leo Marvin (Dreyfus), deflating every potential charge of stalking with his incredibly winning personality – the townsfolk of the New Hampshire town warm to Bob, and so does Leo’s family. It helps that it’s easier to like Bob than Leo.
This is a film that plays to the strengths of both its leads, and their slightly different approach. Murray is more the loose-limbed comedian, Dreyfus the precise tactician but both hit the funny button pretty regularly with performances that cut against each other in precisely the way that their characters do – it’s the immovable force meeting the irresistible object.
Like in the best comedies, there are great support players in attendance – Julie Hagerty as Leo’s sweet wife and Tom Aldredge and Susan Wills as the Guttmans, a smalltown couple who feel that swank out-of-towner Leo has stolen the house they wanted to buy and won’t let him forget it.
At times Frank Oz just lets things ride along in a style reminiscent of Disney family comedies of the 1960s. This means good-natured implausibility with all the lights turned on so we can see what’s going on and performances you suspect Oz is trying to push further than either Murray or Dreyfus really want to go.
It was meant to be Robin Williams as Bob and Patrick Stewart as Leo, but that would have been a different film entirely, one in which Stewart was constantly fighting a rearguard action against the scene-stealing Williams.
You could also imagine Michael Haneke, in his Funny Games period, doing something very different with this material. It is at bottom a disturbing story about an unwell man creeping around after his doctor and family when they’re at their most disarmed. Horror-movie stuff.
And you could also imagine a scenario where someone sat down at the conceptual stage and wondered aloud whether they couldn’t make it all a touch less implausible. There’s a strong element of “only in the movies” here. Call the cops and have Bob arrested, for god’s sake.
If you can park those potential objections, there’s a lot to like here and many funny moments, particularly the physical stuff between Bob and Leo. Bob rescuing Leo with a Heimlich manoeuvre after some chicken goes down the wrong way; Leo trying to wake Bob in the morning with a wake-up call that starts with a mild shake and ends with an earthquake-inducing bouncing. Funny, very funny. Very winning performances. Not sure whey the big guys didn’t think it worth a shake. Their loss.
What About Bob? – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
