The Total Filmmaker

It's too bad, because one of the things that's so great about Martin's absurdist persona is the gleam of menace (or maybe it's just intelligence) in his Everyman's rubber face. He's an immensely likable performer, but his eyes can go suddenly, even scarily, beady, which is why he was so effective in Pennies From Heaven and perhaps why Stanley Kubrick once thought of him for the lead of Eyes Wide Shut. Unlike a lot of comics, Martin doesn't seem to hate himself or the world, but neither is he particularly self-enamored. Unlike, say, Woody Allen or Albert Brooks, he has never seemed interested in plumbing the depths of his own menace, shedding light on the darkness -- he just sticks an arrow through his head, grows a banana nose or makes like the white Al Roker. Even when he dates a girl less than half his age, as he does in L.A. Story, he doesn't build an entire movie around his neurosis, he just shrugs his shoulders and gets on with it, with no apologies and no excuses.

That's why he's so perfectly placed here. Bowfinger loves his cast and crew, and at one point even grandly claims to have a conscience, but his self-interest is always stronger than any of his altruistic urges, which of course makes him an ideal director. The only sentimental thing about him is his knee-jerk cynicism. In this inventive inversion of Allen's Zelig, in which a nobody insinuates himself into history, a star is appropriated by a group of innocents whose intentions are blissfully pure. Bowfinger, a terrifically clever film, has a soft-boiled heart, but it also turns on a smart metaphor for the ways in which the unfamous sometimes lay claim to the famous. Bowfinger doesn't feel all that bad about invading Kit's life, because he already feels as if part of Kit belongs to him. If Martin doesn't see anything wrong or terribly ominous about that, it's because in his Hollywood, siphoning off fame is just another way of saying I love you.

BOWFINGER| Directed by FRANK OZ | Written by STEVE MARTIN

Produced by BRIAN GRAZER | Released by Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment | Citywide