The Marrakesh international Film Festival paid tribute to Bill Murray on its opening night Friday. As he was making his way to the theater, an interviewer stopped him on the red carpet and asked how he'd pay homage to Bill Murray. He replied, I'd say I always love you best when you're most engaged with the world. Then Murray wandered off the red carpet and started engaging with the crowd.
He shook hands and waved and grabbed this one kid's hand and shook it playfully for a long time, until the boy started giggling. The zany generosity of spirit reminded me of one of my favorite Murray films, and along with My Bodyguard one of the great 1970s movies about adolescence, Meatballs, where he plays a summer camp counselor who brings a lonely camper out of his shell.
Then Murray started speaking with one middle-aged woman in a headscarf and it occurred to me they probably didn't understand what the other one was saying, and she likely didn't know who he was. And still she started laughing. That reminded me of my late mother. Murray moved into our apartment building on the east side of Manhattan back in the early 80s and my brothers and sister and I were ecstatic. He'd been on "Saturday Night Live" for a few years by then, and we were already quoting Caddyshack like American adolescent scripture, but my mother didn't really know who he was. Maybe Murray intuited as much because every time we'd all pile in to the elevator and he was there, he focused his attention on her. I don't remember if he said much—and I suspect he didn't understand much of what she was saying through a thick Spanish accent—but she always got off the elevator laughing.
Successful comedy is often a function to how long it takes an audience to tell when an actor is being funny or being serious. When it works, the comic payoff is big, but the extra beat in which it takes to tell that he is in fact being serious is often fraught with peril. Murray was serious Friday. "My heart is heavy because of Paris," he said. "My heart is heavy because of San Bernardino." Murray made a plea for mutual understanding and communication, which was moving, but also struck me as confusing. The terrorist attacks in Paris last month, and the attack in San Bernardino this week weren't about breakdowns in communication.
Colleagues told me that Murray is also deeply saddened by the mass shooting in his hometown of Charleston, S.C. in June when Dylann Roof killed 9 people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. But he didn't mention that incident. It seems rather he was trying to address what he sees as problem in communication between Muslims, which made up a majority of the mostly Moroccan audience, and non-Muslims. This seems to have left the audience as confused as I was. The very premise of the festival is that there is lots of communication between Western and Muslim countries and socities, including business. That includes a recent Murray film, Rock the Kasbah, which was shot here in Morocco, and shown after the tribute. The final credits showed that most of the crew was Moroccan.
In the film, Murray plays a down-on-his-luck rock promoter who finds his way to Afghanistan where he discovers a young woman with a beautiful voice. She comes from a traditional family, whose father, the village chief, doesn't want her to sing in public, never mind on the TV show, "Afghan Idol," watched by the whole country. The film then is a rather too explicit dramatization about communication between societies, and what they have to learn from each other.
What America teaches in the film is that as long as everyone does the right thing, things will turn out right. Accordingly, Murray's character, who thinks of himself as consummate deal-maker, tries to reason with toughs associated with a rival of the girl's father. They soon tire of hearing him blather on and shoot him. As he's lying on the ground, with bullets flying over him, he seems to have internalized a piece of mystic eastern wisdom suggested in the previous scene: He should see past the external noise he surrounds himself with and embrace life in its essence. That's a nice epiphany, but as political wisdom it's lacking. After all, he's just been shot.
The other way to understand the scene is that he was shot because sometimes you can't talk your way out of something. You may have done nothing wrong, except maybe talk a little too much, and someone still wants to kills you. That's what predatory violence is about. That's what terrorism is about. Talk isn't going to save you.
Colleagues who saw him the next day told me that Murray was self-deprecating. What do I know, he said? I'm just an actor. Nonetheless, it was an honest attempt to fill a gap that has now most unfortunately been occupied by Donald Trump. The issue isn't about communication between the West and Islam. I think the issue rather is about a series of internal conversations that both societies need to have with themselves. It's a theme on which I hope to elaborate over the next few days here in Marrakesh.