The Man With Two Brains

Clouseau, clueless as usual: Steve Martin as the nutty inspector in The Pink Panther. Photo Etienne George. Courtesy Columbia Pictures.

A mostly gentle satire of West Coast pretensions, the 1991 film L.A. Story aimed its sharpest pokes at its creator. In it, writer and star Steve Martin plays Harris Telemacher, a TV meteorologist who searches for love and meaning in the City of Angels. After a delightful opening sequence in which Harris bypasses L.A.’s gridlock by driving over sidewalks and stairs, he arrives at the TV station just in time to don a pith helmet and deliver a weather report laden with silly gags and forced humour. When Harris finishes, the contemptuous anchorwoman turns to him and says, “Harris, someone told me you have a PhD in arts and humanities.”

The weatherman momentarily brightens. “Oh, yes, I do...”

She cuts him off. “A lot of good it did you.” In the brief reaction shot, Harris looks utterly crestfallen.

Adding insult to insult, the show’s director (played by Woody Harrelson) castigates Harris for being too “intellectual” on the air. The director demands “more wacky, less egghead.” Treated as a throwaway line, the accusation delineates the tension that has run through Martin’s career, from his early days as a stand-up comic to his role as Inspector Clouseau in this weekend’s The Pink Panther.

Martin has long struggled to balance the two sides of his comedic persona. Harris Telemacher might get chastised for being too smart, but too often, the star hasn’t been smart enough, slumming his way through pallid mainstream comedies like Bringing Down the House. Occasionally, he breaks the pattern with an offbeat role (like the con man in David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner) or a more personal project like last fall’s Shopgirl (a bittersweet adaptation of his own novella). Martin’s plays and writing for The New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs page are further proof he’s capable of great work — so why is there so little of it? While Bill Murray soaks up plaudits for his recent roles in Lost in Translation and Broken Flowers, Martin, his arguably more gifted contemporary, is associated with dreck like Cheaper by the Dozen.

Martin’s latest effort, The Pink Panther, is a little better than dreck, but not by much. Working from a script he co-wrote, Martin makes a worthy attempt to step into Peter Sellers’s shoes as Clouseau, adding a little sweetness to the character’s trademark idiocy as the inspector bungles his way through a mystery about a murder at a soccer match and the theft of the titular pink diamond. Sadly, the movie’s overall sloppiness undermines his efforts. The Pink Panther hardly seems in step with Martin’s egghead aspirations... unless he used the paycheque to bankroll another play or purchase a few new pieces for his impressive art collection (which includes works by Cy Twombly, David Hockney and Georges Seurat).

You've got to love prop comedy: Martin in a 1978 television appearance. (Photo Getty Images/NBC Television)

Martin’s self-penned joke about a wasted PhD in L.A. Story also smacks of masochism. Having studied philosophy at California State University in Long Beach, Martin pondered a career in academia before becoming a stand-up comedian in the 1970s. His routines mixed novelty songs and broad buffoonery with slyly absurd bits that betrayed an agile mind at work. Even when the characters were as crude as his fun-loving Czech on Saturday Night Live or the boneheaded hero of The Jerk (1979), Martin was as much egghead as wacky. Here was a smart comic who knew how to play dumb.

Other early vehicles — like the deranged romantic comedy The Man With Two Brains (1983) — put both Martin’s flailing limbs and nimble imagination to good use. He even felt free to surprise audiences by appearing in Pennies From Heaven (1981), Herbert Ross’s militantly downbeat adaptation of the Dennis Potter musical. Despite his promise as a dramatic actor, Martin would seldom take such risks in the years to come. Imagine what he might have done with Stanley Kubrick, who was apparently so impressed by The Jerk, he auditioned Martin for what became Tom Cruise’s role in Eyes Wide Shut.

With the melancholy, love-starved protagonist in The Lonely Guy (1984), Martin established a character type to which he would repeatedly return. He wrote and starred in Roxanne (1987), a charming adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac, which featured a hero whose heart was as big as his nose. Like L.A. Story, these two films offered an ideal combination of physical comedy, romantic repartee and gracefully surreal flights of fancy.

Curiously, Martin has never directed any of his films. In an interview with E! Online in 1999, he explained why: “I like being the writer. I like being the actor, but I like having an objective eye around, a director who’s looking at my work.” As a result of this reticence, he’s never attained the auteur status given Woody Allen, even though the films made from Martin’s scripts bear his signature far more strongly than that of any hired-gun director.

In between personal efforts, Martin hasn’t been very choosy. For every great performance in a film like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) — as a smart con-man who plays very, very dumb — there were two or three woeful roles that consisted chiefly of him yelling and falling over furniture. Detours that took him away from the middle of the road — like playing the straight-man dentist in the indie comedy Novocaine (2001) — were nearly as rare. While he retained the persona of the forlorn lover for the movies he wrote for himself, the actor developed a lucrative career playing put-upon dads in the Father of the Bride and Cheaper by the Dozen franchises. (Martin has no kids himself. Does that make it harder or easier to plausibly parent Hilary Duff?)

Since Martin has spent so long in the belly of the Hollywood beast, it’s tempting to see Bowfinger (1999) as evidence of his artistic frustrations. Sadly, his satire of moviemaking is far too genial for that. Nor does Martin’s play Picasso at the Lapin Agile smack of stymied ambitions. A light-hearted, Tom Stoppard-like piece about a meeting between Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein and Elvis, it was first mounted in Los Angeles in 1994 and is currently being prepped for a film version.

One of few onscreen signs of Martin’s often-AWOL egghead was Shopgirl. Largely neglected by critics and audiences upon its release last October, Shopgirl presented a quietly radical departure from Martin’s brash Hollywood comedies. A romance between an emotionally stunted middle-aged man and a beautiful young woman who’s uncertain about her direction in life, Shopgirl was doomed to draw (unfavourable) comparisons with Lost in Translation — even though Martin’s novella was published three years before the release of Sofia Coppola’s movie. Many critics and viewers were thrown by Ray Porter, an atypical character for Martin. Bill Murray’s deadpan actor in Lost in Translation might have been a little prickly, but he was far more sympathetic than Porter. Cool and detached, Ray Porter believes he’s incapable of loving another person, even when that person looks like Claire Danes. A few moments reveal cracks in Ray’s façade of indifference. The most memorable comes when Ray leaves his young paramour alone in his bedroom for a moment and returns to find her nude on the bed. The look on Martin’s face is achingly sad and sweet, as if Ray knows he’s unworthy of this love — but will take it anyway.

Like that reaction shot in L.A. Story years before, the moment is over almost before it can register with the viewer. Whereas so many actors and comedians proudly brandish their hurts and pains, Martin usually forgoes messy emotional stuff, preferring to be shamelessly clownish or slyly cerebral. In other words, he retreats into the wacky or the egghead. Unfortunately, it’s become increasingly difficult for him to bridge the two extremes. For all its loveliness, Shopgirl was too lackadaisical to satisfy as a comedy and too static to work as a drama. Consequently, it failed to bring Martin the sort of late-career prestige Bill Murray currently enjoys. (Even so, both guys are better off than Chevy Chase.)

A project that already suffered several changes in release date before arriving in Hollywood’s February dead zone, The Pink Panther will not improve Martin’s cachet. His lower-profile projects and writings all suggest that he still boasts one of America’s finest comedic minds. But a lot of good it does him most of the time.

The Pink Panther opens Feb. 10 across Canada.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto writer.

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