Thinking Big

By R.S.

THE RAZOR'S EDGE Directed by John Byrum Screenplay by John Byrum and Bill Murray

If you are going to spend the better part of two decades searching for The Meaning of Life, it is an excellent idea to maintain your good nature while pursuing the quest. It smooths out the highs (the inevitable lamasery in the Himalayas) and the lows (a stint of hard labor in a French coal mine), and it makes the earnest pilgrim a lot easier for his friends (not to mention the movie audience) to take. Besides, playful self-deflation suits Bill Murray, who only did Ghostbusters in return for a shot at the second screen version of Somerset Maugham's most gaseous novel. The laid-back eccentricity of his Larry Darrell disrupts the slick romantic parabola of the story, in a way pretty Tyrone Power never could. And provides a few conscious laughs to balance the unconscious humor that inevitably bubbles up along with its spiritual vaporings.

What sets Larry pondering the question of where he and the world are heading is the horror of World War I trench warfare. Mustered out, he rejects a career in the stock market and marriage to Isabel (Catherine Hicks), his bitchy, materialistic fiancee, in order to embrace the exemplary poverty and thoughtfulness of Left Bank Paris in the '20s. Thereafter, a great deal of breathless plotting contrives to keep him in touch both with Isabel and with Sophie (Theresa Russell), another, more sensitive, therefore more self-destructive girl he left behind. It is not merely that the fulfillments he finds on his stroll along the path to salvation must be contrasted to the jazzy emptiness of the women's lives. The plot must also be maneuvered toward a denouement in which Isabel gets the comeuppance that popular fiction always metes out to the emotionally blind. And poor Sophie, besotted by drugs and sunken to prostitution, must suffer, despite Larry's noble attempt at rescue, the instructive tragedy that popular fiction always awards the emotionally vulnerable.

It requires a heart of stone to keep a straight face at the passing of Little Sophie, and neither the script nor the acting aids in that endeavor. Nor does the picture's style. One would like to think that when a film embraces the conventions of 1950s imagery (blasted tree trunks standing starkly against a battlefield's orange sky, gauzily veiled glimpses of, yes, dens of iniquity) and symbolic set decoration (the wretched excesses of an aesthete's salon contrasted with the too tasteful austerity of an intellectual's garret), it intends an ironic comment on how Hollywood once tried literally to gloss over what it thought of as big, discomforting ideas. But such charity is drowned out by an insistently romantic score, by the screech of the melodramatic resolution to every crisis. Too bad the pipings of Murray's lively, original voice are also swept away in the din.