Bill Murray Fest: Larger Than Life

1996 elephant movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A motivational speaker's father dies, the news which surprises him since he had always thought his father was already dead. He travels to collect his inheritance which turns out to be a trunk of clown memorabilia and an elephant. He's forced to transport that elephant to San Diego by a certain date or face consequences.

I don't even care if you make fun of me for liking Larger Than Life. In fact, if this movie didn't completely fall apart at the end, we're talking 15 or 16 out of 20 territory here. My friend Josh explained this pretty well. It's Bill Murray doing what Bill Murray does best--playing a character who doesn't really want to do what he is forced to be doing. And transporting an elephant across the country is definitely not what he wants to do. Murray's one-liners are great ("My father was a giant?"), and some of that improvisational feel. His rapport with the elephant is also really good. The elephant is played by Tai, an actual elephant as opposed to five or six people operating a giant elephant suit although I would definitely be interesting in seeing that as well. Tai's only acted in one other movie--Rosie in Water for Elephants--but he or she was also apparently in Exit Through the Gift Shop. It's a great animal performance though. The evolving bond between Murray and Tai is entirely believable because of the pair of good performances. Watching Murray try to drive a semi might be worth the price of admission alone--"I don't know how to drive this!" The movie's other truck driver, a pre-Oscar-candidate Matthew McConaughey as Tip Tucker, is ridiculously unhinged. I'm pretty sure he's playing his redneck a little gay, but I really had trouble telling. He's so over the top and gets so many lines very quickly. The ones you catch, like "How do [elephants] do it? I mean, make whoopie?", almost make you want to rewatch his scenes to see what else he said. The contrast between an ultra-cool Murray and an ultra-silly McConaughey is a lot of fun. I liked this movie's pace and its quirky humor. But man, that ending, a scene at an airport where the rubber band of implausibility was stretched too far and just stamped. And when Murray said, "You know they say an elephant never forgets, but what they don't tell you is that you never forget an elephant," I almost wanted to punch my television. I couldn't figure out why Bill Murray would agree to say something like that. For a moment, I'd convinced myself that Larger Than Life was too cool of a movie to have something that gross in it and that it was ironic. But then there was a "Where are they now?" scroll. One more note: a guy at a truck junkyard was really good. I believe his name is Greg Ward, and he's only been in four movies. One of them, however, is playing "Tosses Camera Off Cliff" in Slacker. There's a movie I need to see again.