Do You Still Love Eddie?

By RICHARD CORLISS

Moviegoers adopt movie stars. They spot some fresh face in the orphanage of anonymity, fall in love with him, take him home and become parents to his fame. They are possessive too. When he shines, they smile; when he acts up, they get angry. Or worse, lose interest. If he gets a swelled head, or pays them no heed, they may disown their golden child. There are so many, after all, in the show-biz foundling home.

Such is the problem facing Eddie Murphy, 31, as he awaits this week's release of Boomerang, his first film in two years. From the moment in 1980 when he burst onto Saturday Night Live, Murphy had the audience's eye. More, he had their affection; not just his talent but his boyish good nature won him that. And because comic charisma radiated through the characters he played on SNL, Murphy was able to jump from TV-sketch artist to big-screen draw. He took two roles Richard Pryor had rejected, in 48 HRS. and Trading Places, and overtook Pryor as the top black film star. He stepped into a Sylvester Stallone part, in Beverly Hills Cop, and strutted to the top of the world. Cop II was even bigger. Raw, a concert film, and Coming to America cemented his grand rep. He had a hit pop single and sold-out tours. Fast Eddie had become Vast Eddie -- and then, as sure as excess follows success, Half-Vast.

The decline was subtle: not the incendiary self-destruction of a Pryor -- no drug overdose for Eddie, not even a sex scandal -- just the makings of the sour dissolution of the elder Elvis, a star Murphy much admired. He put on weight and acted like a jerk. Cockiness shaded into arrogance. He seemed to guest-star in his own films (Harlem Nights, Another 48 HRS.), touring them with the grudging ennui of a celebrity at a Kiwanis gig somebody had booked for him. The star was now as remote as Alpha Centauri. A squadron of bodyguards kept him cocooned in satiety, assuring that no fan would rush up to ask, "Weren't you Eddie Murphy?"

There was another crucial factor. As a black star, Murphy was pigeonholed by the industry. "When it comes to black actors," says Reginald Hudlin, the (black) director of Boomerang, "many screenwriters find it difficult to get beyond race." Then, too, the zeitgeist was changing. For all his street sass and gutter gargle, Murphy is basically a middle-class star, closer to Bill Cosby than to the new wave of African-American filmmakers (Spike Lee, John Singleton) and rapmasters (all those hot Ices). Their marketable anger made Eddie look timid, irrelevant, a hipper but still compromised version of the old Negro clown -- a white man's black.

Two things to remember. One: Murphy may have wrangled with his employers at Paramount Pictures, feeling they undervalued him and failed to scour the town for the most suitable projects, but people never stopped going to his films. Harlem Nights earned a respectable $60 million at the North American box office; Another 48 HRS., $80 million. Two: he hasn't lost his potential. "There are only a few others -- Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin -- in Eddie's league as a brilliant comic talent," says Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Disney sachem who worked with the young Eddie at Paramount and is shepherding Murphy's next film, Distinguished Gentlemen, at Disney. "Just as important, he's realigned his management team and has a great relationship with Brandon Tartikoff at Paramount. He's an ambitious, nailed-down, determined actor who has a big agenda of things he wants to get done."

First on the list is Boomerang, a bright comedy about a wealthy ad executive -- his Manhattan apartment isn't a duplex, it's a googolplex -- who discovers what it's like to be on the used end of a romance. Murphy, Hudlin (House Party) and scenarists Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield (who wrote many of Murphy's SNL bits, plus Coming to America) were inspired by Annie Hall (which Murphy has seen five times) and by the screwball love stories of '30s Hollywood. So the movie offers an Eddie role reversal: the famous ladies' man is a demure love slave to Robin Givens' sexually dominating boss. Like a smitten girl, he sits by the phone, head to it, waiting for it to ring. He's miffed when she's late for a date. After sex, he says, "You make me feel dirty" and "I'm calling my mother." It makes for good comedy -- and clever career rehab.

Boomerang also establishes Eddie as the charming center, almost the host, of a cast of genial zanies. They get most of the laughs. The criminally adorable Halle Berry provides the movie's heart. And Murphy is the stage manager, smiling his approval. In one pretty scene a lively child named Khandra Mkhize gives a little speech, with wide eyes and beautifully broad gestures, and Eddie mimics her, gesture for gesture, charm for charm. This is what he has always been: not just the performer but the audience too. He's us, with a little comic genius on the side.

And he is still black, but not too black; Sheffield calls this upscale homeboy movie Boyz in the Boardroom. Murphy says he's not a political creature, but these days everything is political. To stand in the middle of the mainstream, without being washed away by more violent social currents, is a bold stand in itself. So Eddie wants to please everyone. He's done it before. And on the evidence of this ingratiating comic fantasy, he's boomeranging back.

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York