THE NUTTY PROFESSOR
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Eddie Murphy, Jada Pinkett, Larry Miller, James Coburn, Dave Chappelle. Screenplay: David Sheffield, Barry W. Blaustein, Tom Shadyac, Steve Oedekerk. Director: Tom Shadyac. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
If you ask most movie stars whether a given project is a "comeback," they would probably insist that they were never away. In the case of Eddie Murphy, that's actually pretty close to the truth. _You_ may not have seen HARLEM NIGHTS, or THE DISTINGUISHED GENTLEMAN, or BOOMERANG, or even BEVERLY HILLS COP III, but someone did -- over $300 million worth of someones, in fact. So no, Eddie Murphy never went anywhere; it was only his ability to make people laugh which took a long vacation. I was beginning to wonder whether there was any of the old spark left in Murphy, and then along comes THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. he still might have trouble identifying a decent script, but his talent is in full flower, including an unexpectedly broad acting range.
Murphy plays Sherman Klump, a brilliant chemistry professor with a bit of a weight problem -- about 400 lbs. worth. His weight has resulted in clashes with the university's dean (Larry Miller) and has made him rather unlucky in love. When the department's new graduate student Carla Purdy (Jada Pinkett) captures Sherman's fancy, he resorts to testing his latest experiment, a formula for reducing weight at a genetic level, on himself. The result is a startling transformation of Sherman Klump into Buddy Love, a lean, mean testosterone machine who is every bit the party animal Sherman never was. The problems begin when Buddy reverts to Sherman at the most inconvenient times, and gets worse when Buddy's personality begins to become dominant, threatening to take over Sherman's life for good.
The lion's share of the pleasures in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR are pure Eddie Murphy, but not necessarily Eddie Murphy the way you are accustomed to seeing him. True, he does take on multiple roles behind Rick Baker's incredible makeup, including a Richard Simmons-styled fitness guru and several members of the Klump family, much as he did in COMING TO AMERICA. There are some big laughs in those family dinner scenes, particularly an extraordinarily embarrassing dinner with Carla in attendance, although the flatulence gags are piled on a bit thick. But Murphy is not coasting on his street-wise motor-mouth persona here, the persona which often seemed to be the only reason for dud projects like THE GOLDEN CHILD or THE DISTINGUISHED GENTLEMAN to exist. If anything, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR is a chance to poke fun at that persona through the hyper-slick Buddy Love. Buddy is the arrogant, self-absorbed misogynist everyone probably believes Murphy really is, and he knows enough to tweak that image for all he's worth.
The real surprise is watching Murphy sink his teeth into a real character, and do some real acting. Klump is not a sad-sack or a grotesquerie, like his counterpart in the Jerry Lewis original; he is a sensitive soul who tries to laugh along when he knows others are laughing at him, until that laughter becomes a humiliation at the hands of an obnoxious "Def Comedy Jam"-type stand-up comic (hilariously played by Dave Chappelle). At the same time, Klump shows a streak of the repressed sex god, grooving to Teddy Pendergrass after Carla agrees to go out with him. Murphy brings out that side as something endearing, and makes his shy, self-effacing manner terrifically appealing. I never thought I would see the day when Eddie Murphy would play a character who inspired sympathy, but watching Klump disintegrate before a barrage of the comedian's barbs is genuinely poignant.
Murphy is so good that it's too bad he doesn't have better material to work with, or a more supportive supporting cast. The exceptions to both rules come in the wonderful nightclub scenes, the second of which finds a caustic Buddy turning the tables on the same comic who tore Sherman to shreds. For the most part, the script is all set-up with few truly inspired comic situations, relying on absurdist dream sequences and special effects for the big gags. There are moments when Buddy Love is on screen that you are waiting for Murphy to run to the extreme, and ACE VENTURA director Tom Shadyac just seems to be waiting for him to do something wacky. The script doesn't really give him the best opportunities, though, and he is playing off undeserving foils in Jada Pinkett and an uncomfortably edgy Larry Miller. Murphy is trying to show what he can do here, and he is given material like the overly obvious homily at the film's conclusion which doesn't show trust in his abilities to convey emotion without spelling it all out. Those abilities turn out to be what makes THE NUTTY PROFESSOR so much fun. Welcome back, Eddie, even if you never went away.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 weighting games: 7.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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