Best year ever: Bowfinger

Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy and Frank Oz create a classic farce.

Bowfinger is popcorn topped with cyanide. An ode to the dreamers on the fringe of the movie industry, it’s also canny enough to know every one of those dreamers would push their mother into oncoming traffic to show up on the big screen.

Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin) is a director who, as far as we can tell, has never helmed anything but local theater. His office is lined with posters of his starring roles in community productions and his surely shoddy acting classes. Like many Martin characters, he’s full of unearned confidence and plays fast and loose with the truth – it’s how he’s kept a stable of hopeful actors, writers and camera people around him, despite the fact that he’s never actually rolled film (it helps that the movie hints that none of them are great at what they do). 

As the film opens, Bowfinger has just finished a screenplay written by his accountant, Afrim. Whether he really believes the script is great – given that it’s called Chubby Rain, that’s doubtful – or he just needs to make a film before he hits 50, Bowfinger decides this will be his dream project. He worms his way into a casual conversation with a Hollywood exec (Robert Downey Jr.), who quickly catches on to Bowfinger’s ruse but playfully says he’ll greenlight Chubby Rain if Bowfinger can bring megastar Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy) onboard. 

Where others would recognize the brushoff, Bowfinger sees an opportunity, and decides he’s going to shoot the film around Kit, without his knowledge. Armed with a cast of amateur actors – including an ingénue from Ohio eager to do anything for more screen time (Heather Graham) and a struggling actress who thinks she’s overdue for an Oscar (Christine Baranski) – as well as a crew made up of border-crossing migrants, Bowfinger sets out to shoot around Kit. But Kit has his own surprises; he’s deeply paranoid, constantly turning to his leader at the Scientology-but-not cult Mindhead to assure him there are no aliens trying to abduct him. When Bowfinger needs a Kit double for close-ups, he comes across the star’s nerdy mirror image, Jif (also Murphy). 

It’s a very silly, fast-moving farce, and Martin’s script is filled with playful – and sometimes playfully mean – digs at Hollywood, its denizens and the studio system. There’s real acid when Downey’s exec complains that he had to fight for his car in his divorce but offhandedly tosses out that she got custody of the kids. Kit’s not an artist; he just wants his catchphrase (“where’s my hasta la vista, baby?”) and rejects a line of dialogue as being “too cerebral” because “we’re making a movie, not a film.”  Bowfinger’s cheap filmmaking approaches lead to some really funny outcomes; yes, it’s a good joke when he wants “the best crew we can afford,” and brings onboard a team of migrants. It’s even funnier later in the film to see them reading books on film and discussing Kubrick. Martin’s satire is affectionate; he knows just how craven and soulless Hollywood can be; he also knows he’s just as roped into the Dream Factory myth as anyone else. 

Aside from Only Murders in the Building, Martin doesn’t do much acting these days. His last co-headlining credit was in 2011’s The Big Year, and you’d have to go back to 2009’s It’s Complicated or The Pink Panther 2 to find him front and center in a film that people actually saw. Watching him in Bowfinger, I realized how much I missed a purely comedic Martin performance. He wrote this role to his strengths and leans into playing a lovable schemer who is not afraid to manipulate people and who bemoans his eventual growth of a conscience. There’s an exuberance to his underhanded schemes; even as Bowfinger cajoles and lies, you can’t quite get upset because he’s so optimistic. Besides, everyone’s doing it. 

The ensemble around Martin is a lot of fun. Graham’s another actor who doesn’t show up nearly as often as she should; this would have been one of her first big roles post Boogie Nights (the other being Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, which came out a few months prior). Graham is so good at playing both a naive dreamer as well as someone unafraid to use her body to get what she wants – completely aware of how to use one persona to benefit the other. Yes, it’s a bit of a sleazy joke that she sleeps her way to the top – and having her hook up with “one of the most powerful lesbians in Hollywood” in 1999 would have likely been an unkind dig at Martin’s old flame, Anne Heche – but Graham’s in on the joke and really good at selling it. She’s a solid comic actor and I wish we saw more of her these days. 

The rest of the ensemble is also quirky and fun. I love Baranski’s self-seriousness and the way she pokes fun at her character’s bad acting – there’s a bit where she’s watching herself on screen and Baranski gets a big laugh with a simple eyebrow raise. Jamie Kennedy is Bowfinger’s exasperated lackey. Downey is funny as a soulless Hollywood rep, and Terrence Stamp – just shortly before The Limey would issue a late-period career resurgence – is really funny as Kit’s Mindhead sponsor, frustrated by Kit’s constant issues, yet eager to keep profiting from them. Also, perhaps only Stamp could sell the line “we keep Mr. Weenie in the pants” with a straight face and a sound of authority. 

But the star is Murphy, who was still strong off his Nutty Professor comeback. I think the dual roles of Kit and Jif are some of Murphy’s funniest. Parodying his own superstardom, Murphy has a blast playing up Kit’s ego, but his funniest moments come when he deflates it. Kit’s overly sensitive to potential racial conspiracies, dividing use of the letter K in his script to see how many times KKK appears, and easily turns his agent’s suggestion of “Shakespeare” into a racial epithet. Kit also has a number of major fears, mainly that there’s “a giant foot trying to squash” him, as well as aliens who are going to come down and “inhale his gonads;” he also has a penchant for flashing the Lakers cheerleaders. This vulnerable, unhinged side of what is an otherwise braggadocious Murphy character is extremely funny, especially as Bowfinger’s film and the presences of its “aliens” begins to trigger Kit further. 

But Murphy’s even funnier as Jif, the nerdy “double” for Kit that Bowfinger discovers – who is actually Kit’s brother. Murphy loves to do the dual roles, and it’s usually these supporting characters who steal the entire show – think all the Klump relatives or the numerous barbershop attendees in Coming to America. Jif is no different, as Murphy inverts all his natural charisma to create an awkward, bumbling dork who, when asked if he's willing to cut his hair, says that yes, but it’s usually better if someone else does it. Every one of Jif’s lines is a howler, whether it’s his cries of “Heavenly God” when Bowfinger asks him to dash across traffic or his embarrassed laugh and cry of “you’re gonna be a star” when he has to double in a love scene with Graham’s character. 

I don’t think Frank Oz has been properly appreciated as one of our great comedy directors, but it’s undeniable. Little Shop of Horrors, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, What About Bob and In & Out all belong on a short list of best comedies of the 1980s and 1990s, and Bowfinger should be there as well. It’s hard to make farce flow effortlessly, and Oz understands just how to let the various characters and plot threads weave in and out of each other. Bowfinger is a film in which half the characters don’t know what the people standing next to them are doing, and Oz makes sure we’re always aware of what’s going on, who knows what, and that all the laughs land. I can think of very few jokes that don’t hit their mark. And he also never loses sight of the heart of the film and the joy of putting on a show; despite all the shenanigans, backstabbing and ruses, the film ends on a sweet note as everyone watches the film play on the big screen (there’s even a pretty great joke where Bowfinger is relegated to a bad seat and doesn’t mind). And everyone gets what they want – even if it’s not the superstardom they aimed for (for what it’s worth, I would have seen a Bowfinger 2 about the making of Fake Purse Ninjas). 

Bowfinger is not usually on the short list when people talk about the best films of 1999, but I’d easily put it in my top 10. It’s silly, sure. But its comedy is smart, its characters likable and it delivers on the vast majority of its laughs. It’s one of the great movies about movies, and a high mark for two of our greatest comic actors.