Review of Bowfinger (1999) by Gareth R — 11 Mar 2010

A lot of great movies have been made about bad ones, and Bowfinger is a fine example. Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin) has finally got a decent script, or one that'll sell anyway, and all he needs is a star. When he fails to get one, he does the next best thing: shoot the film around him, and just tell the film crew that he does all his stuff in one take. Unfortunately the movie star is Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), whose grip on reality is tenuous at best, and Bobby's crew are a bunch of no-hope misfits. The results are funny, imaginative and, yes, even a little heartwarming. I slightly love Bowfinger.

Martin's script is a gentle, but occasionally sharp satire of the moviemaking business, which has fun with a few cliches, such as the small town girl (Heather Graham) coming to LA so she can be an actress. In Bowfinger, she's not as innocent as she looks, and will gleefully sleep with the props guy if it means more screentime. Eddie Murphy is delightfully insane as Ramsey, a bigshot action star who's much too familiar with a popular showbiz cult called MindHead. Steve Martin has argued he's not mocking anyone specific here, but you can draw your own conclusions about certain celebrities and their dealings with certain wacko religions. Martin's and director Frank Oz's film has the unmistakeable whiff of insider knowledge.

Mostly it's just a wacky, funny story. Bowfinger is making a bodysnatching aliens picture, which means corny lines and bad monster effects. It's all quite fondly done, bringing to mind movies like Ed Wood that celebrated low-budget naffness. This is the script Be Kind Rewind wishes it had.

The cast, much like the folks from Ed Wood, are charming losers. Perhaps best is Eddie Murphy, who also plays a guy Bowfinger hires to double for Ramsey. Jif, the bespectacled geek, is an adorably sympathetic creation, and proves that Murphy can do multiple roles in movies without it spilling over into Nutty Professor excess. Steve Martin marshals the madness as Bowfinger, and he's a charming hero, adept at faking and bullshitting to get what he wants, but also genuinely interested in making movies. There's that satire again, showing us how much lying and wheel-greasing must go on to get a movie made, but that every once in a while, the people doing it actually want to do it.

Sometimes, particularly at the end, it veers a little too close to Ed Wood, if its already soft edges were sanded down even further. That's not such a bad thing - Ed's my favourite film - but Bowfinger works better when it leans more towards satire than homage. Steve Martin doesn't want to pick a fight, and his movie never feels like an attack on anything. Nevertheless, it's wise enough to raise a few eyebrows, all the while celebrating low-budget no-talent filmmaking in a way that makes you want to watch more movies. And so what if they're a little rough around the edges? Like Ramsey says: "We're trying to make a movie here, not a film!".