Dreamers and Schemers

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Hollywood, as we all know, runs on high hopes and impossible dreams, which just often enough--about once in a thousand times--come true. But at a certain level, it also runs on cold pizza, unpaid phone bills and scripts by people for whom English is a second language. It's at this latter level that Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin), who operates Bowfinger International Pictures out of his ratty bungalow, scrounges along.

Far above him, seemingly safe behind the walls of his estate, his entourage and his raging paranoia, lives the world's greatest action star, Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), his sanity tenuously secured by devotion to a group that bears a passing resemblance to Scientology.

Bowfinger, perhaps the funniest movie for grownups so far this year, recounts the attempt of the desperate former to feature the fame-addled latter in his absurd project. Basically, this involves making Kit the star of a movie without telling him he's in it. That in turn requires Bobby and his crew to stalk and provoke the star into photographable action. Since Kit is at least half convinced that he is being plagued by space aliens, these intrusions add fuel to the flame of his pathology.

Preposterous, you say. It would never work. But part of the weird genius of Bowfinger is that its central conceit never falls into total implausibility. At some point in the picture, you begin to see that this mad scheme is working. Or maybe it's just that you succumb to the enthusiasm with which Bobby and his associates perpetrate their con.

They are a wonderfully rum lot and include an ingenue fresh off the bus from Ohio (Heather Graham) who doesn't know much about Hollywood except that a girl is supposed to sleep her way to the top, which she's up for; a failed leading lady (Christine Baranski), boldly living out her frustrated dreams of Method acting in all the wrong places; and a production crew composed of illegal aliens who start out not knowing one end of the camera from the other and end up in learned discussions of how Fellini or Orson Welles might have shot the scene.

That's all good stuff, but the best thing about Bowfinger is the way the script by Steve Martin is tooled to his own and Murphy's comic strengths. At its best, Martin's screen character is a dislocating combination of yearning and take-no-prisoners opportunism. He's like a premoral child--appalling yet somehow charming. Murphy has the comic nerve to play stardom as a form of flat-out psychosis. His sweet side surfaces in the second character he plays, Kit's brother Jiff, whom Bobby hires as a part-time gofer, part-time stunt double, full-time victim of everyone's heedlessness.

The movie satirizes everything from the cell-phone culture to celebrity fawning, but its director, Frank Oz, knows that satire--especially show-biz satire--is what closes on Saturday night. So his style is casually naturalistic. He makes you believe this goofiness might really be happening. You know what? Somewhere, not necessarily in the movies, not necessarily so merrily, it probably is.

--By Richard Schickel