by Pauline Kael
Periodically, a new comedy is acclaimed for all the things it wants to be but isn’t. Last summer, Trading Places, with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, was greeted as “an event” and “a film of real wit and imagination”; before that there were such pearls of wit and imagination as Nine to Five and Foul Play. The bummer that’s getting the tributes this summer is Ghostbusters, which features Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis as parapsychologists. Thrown out of their cushy university research jobs, these three doctors set up a business: they advertise themselves as experts in trapping any ectoplasmic manifestations that may be bothering people. That’s actually not a bad premise for a scare comedy, and the producer-director, Ivan Reitman, has assembled a good backup cast. What goes wrong? Well, the script (by Aykroyd and Ramis) provides Murray with funky lines, and he delivers them stunningly; he can make even the simplest statement seem a gambit or a fraud—his pores ooze untrustworthiness. Murray is the film’s comic mechanism: the more supernatural the situation, the more jaded his reaction. But nobody else has much in the way of material, and since there’s almost no give-and-take among the three men, Murray’s lines fall on dead air. (Sometimes the niftier the line the bigger the thud.) Part of what goes wrong is in the script: Aykroyd and Ramis were too self-effacing—they didn’t give themselves enough to do. A larger part, I think, is in Reitman’s directing. He brought off the 1981 Stripes, which was a big jump up from his earlier comedy, the 1979 Meatballs, but this time his work is amateurish. He may have been overwhelmed by the scale of the production; at roughly thirty-two million, it’s much more ambitious than anything he has attempted before. The sets and special effects include crowds watching as spirits come shooting out of the top of a Central Park West apartment building and skies go purplish—it’s big, all right, but it isn’t very funny. When the ghostbusters—the three have been joined by a fourth, a black actor (Ernie Hudson), in what seems like an afterthought—rush to save the city from spooks, they’re in the converted ambulance they call an ectomobile, at the head of a procession of police cars, with an escort of police motorcycles; the scene is uncomfortably like the big convergence of vehicles in The Blues Brothers. I think Reitman also made a mistake in choosing Laszlo Kovacs as his cinematographer; the images have a heavy, overdeliberate look—they’re too rigid for comedy. The actors look impaled in Kovacs’ lighting.
The movie does have some things going for it: its logo, for one—a small, blobby ghost (like the Pillsbury doughboy or a member of the trio in Casper, the Friendly Ghost) who pops out of the “o” in Ghostbusters. (I came to associate this lump of dough with Aykroyd, who seemed rather unformed, and soft and sleepy.) Mainly, the movie has its performers. Playing opposite Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver is a living zinger. She has a great set of bones and planes, and she’s blazingly alive; she must be the least recessive beauty in movies. When she stands talking to Murray, she’s eye to eye with him, and she looks indestructible. She throws herself into her role here, but her scenes don’t go anywhere, and just when she’s building up her “possessed” number, and seems ready to take off, the action cuts away. Annie Potts, who plays the ghostbusters’ receptionist, uses her wonderful self-enclosed quality; she’s wacked out in a petite, all-by-herself way. Rick Moranis, as a mild, nerdy accountant, takes the role so far that you can see the raging, bigger nerd at his core. And, of course, Bill Murray. His patent insincerity makes him the perfect emblematic hero for the stoned era. He has a genuine outré gift: he makes you feel that his characters are bums inside—unconcerned and indifferent—and he makes that seem like a kind of grace. (He’s always an onlooker; he won’t commit himself even to being in the movie.) What’s surprising about him as a performer is the amount of alertness and energy he pours into being burned out and bleary and blasé. He turns burnout into a style. Murray does his damnedest in Ghostbusters, but he can’t set the rhythms of his performance the way he has sometimes been able to on television, and the way he did in Stripes and in Tootsie; he’s left with joke on his face. It’s possible that the director’s sluggish, kids-movie pacing is the reason Murray is getting a terrific response from people who had queasy reactions to him before; maybe he’s so slowed down that they finally get his humor (and their laughter helps to fill the dead spots). To be more charitable, maybe audiences are roaring at him because he acts in a more outward and endearing way than usual: waiting near the fountain at Lincoln Center, he does a happy little hop, and after the majestic Sigourney has appeared and agreed to go out on a date with him he lifts his arms toward heaven and twirls.
The New Yorker, June 25, 1984
