A-List: Comedians Who Can Be Dramatic
By Josh Spiegel
July 30, 2009
Punch-Drunk Love is the story of Barry, a man who sells novelty plungers out of a large storage unit, is tormented by his seven sisters, and has some form of mental illness, which leads him into fits of rage. Unbelievably, he meets a beautiful woman (Emily Watson) who is very attracted to him. The whole experience is quite odd, a subversion of the characters Sandler is best known for, along with a mishmash of color, songs from 1980's Popeye and one of the most compelling showdowns between two men prone to anger; only an auteur like Paul Thomas Anderson could make this movie, and surprisingly, only Sandler could play this role. He digs deep here, as I hope he does in Funny People, so much so that his performance is perfectly uncomfortable. I only hope he starts backing away from movies like I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.
Jim Carrey
There are strides, and there are strides. It's hard to go from being a guy popping out of a rhino's butt to playing someone whose world is so perfect that it's completely made-up. Yet, Jim Carrey did it, and did it quite well. Though Robin Williams has had the most diverse career among the five men listed here, veering from silliness to scariness, Carrey seems to be more notable in his choices. In some ways, the outrageousness that marked this funnyman's humor in the mid-1990s made it more surprising when he worked very hard to make sure he was believable as Truman Burbank, or as Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon. If anything, Carrey's rubbery face and wild energy may be best served in his next project, Robert Zemeckis' adapation of A Christmas Carol, where he will play, through the magic of motion-capture technology, eight characters, including Ebenezer Scrooge.
Carrey's style hasn't always worked (what, you didn't already forget The Majestic, did you?), but he is very diverse, managing to bring some well-needed pathos to each of his roles, even those that are in particularly terrible films (let's just all agree to forget that The Grinch ever happened). Still, for every misstep, he's been part of something truly brilliant, whether it's The Truman Show or one of the best films of the last ten years, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where he plays someone so depressed that he's probably not smiled in a few years. As long as Carrey keeps making movies like that, it's hard to mock him too hard.
Bill Murray
It took Wes Anderson, a director whose style and movies are mocked mercilessly (unfairly, I'd argue), to make most people realize that Bill Murray was not only a phenomenal actor but an immensely sad one. This breakthrough concept became widely accepted after Murray's supporting turn in Rushmore, as a bored middle-aged man who gets entangled in a love triangle with a teenage boy and the boy's teacher. However, anyone knowledgeable enough with Murray's career knows that he's never truly been a stranger to drama. In the 1980s, he had The Razor's Edge, but his first great role, one that jumped from comedy to something deeper, was Groundhog Day. Yes, this is a comedy, but by the time Murray's main character starts trying to kill himself, it's hard to laugh as much. The movie changes quickly from tone to tone, but Murray's performance is always believable, always relatable.
Since Rushmore, Murray has been a player in all of Anderson's films, whether in a cameo role (The Darjeeling Limited), or as the title character (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). He's also received an Academy Award nomination for the 2003 drama Lost in Translation, a movie I find overrated despite Murray's phenomenally deadpan work. If anything, this is an actor who has gotten much, much better with age. That's not to say I would be against Murray starring in another big-budget comedy like Ghostbusters, but if we're going to get Murray in dramatic roles or as the voice of Garfield the cat...well, I hope he's got more live-action roles in the future, I guess.
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