Larger Than Life
With Bill Murray, Janeane Garofalo, Matthew McConaughey, Keith David, Pat Hingle, Jeremy Piven, Lois Smith, Anita Gillette, and Linda Fiorentino.
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Are you still suffering from postelection malaise? I’ve just gotten back from a couple of weeks in Australia, where voting is compulsory, and for all the complaints I heard about the downsizing of government services and ugly efforts to renege on aboriginal land rights and change immigration policies, the political atmosphere seemed decidedly less alienated and despairing than it does here. This may have something to do with the geographical remoteness of the country, a sense of living on the outskirts that makes Australians less likely to posit themselves as the center of the universe and therefore less likely to have overblown expectations. Indeed, the only outright despair I encountered there was in the only movie I went to see, Love Serenade, a comedy that’s a characteristic example of Australian self-hatred laced with feminist revenge fantasies that Miramax will open here eventually. By contrast, recent American comedies like The Mirror Has Two Faces and Larger Than Life tend to be indefatigably cheerful and optimistic–it’s the world outside them that looks desperate.
In fact, when I returned home the overall mood seemed so defeatist–the polling place where I voted was virtually deserted at noon–that a comic road movie with Bill Murray and an elephant seemed just what I needed. Larger Than Life is admittedly something of a mess–ragged as storytelling, not very funny, uncertain in pacing and style–but it’s far from disagreeable, because it says something about the hapless yearning I sense all around me. In this country’s movies elephants almost invariably turn out to be metaphors–something implied by this film’s title. If the circus elephant named Vera that Jack Corcoran (Bill Murray), a hollow motivational speaker on the convention circuit, inherits from his long-lost father is too literary a conceit and too uncontrollable a prop to register as a fully plausible character, she still suggests the legacies of our country and the expectations we have for it, the unreasonable size of our projected destinies.
The most characteristic slogan of the recent presidential campaign–uttered at various times by Clinton, Gore, Dole, and Kemp–was “This is the greatest country in the world,” sometimes amplified into “This is the greatest country in the history of the world.” It’s a slogan that builds elephantine expectations that can only be dashed after the votes are all counted and we have another (or virtually the same) power configuration–or that split into dissociated realms, nurturing wild dreams in one corner, desperate measures in another. It reminds me of the touching, unshakable belief of many friends in my hometown when I was growing up that Florence, Alabama, was the greatest place in the world and that those unlucky enough to be living in, say, Birmingham, Selma, Dothan, Tuscaloosa, Zip City, Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris, Rome, Moscow, or Tokyo simply hadn’t figured it out yet.
