Movies Where Bill Murray Is Sad

The funniest man of his generation, staring out a window for twenty-five years.

Entries
10
Category
Film
Updated
  1. A mirrored corporate closet door in a Manhattan hotel suite, with a small tear through the fabric of a coat inside.

    10. Hamlet

    Michael Almereyda · 2000

    Polonius, reimagined as a fussy executive at the Denmark Corporation in modern Manhattan, giving fatherly advice no one wants. Ethan Hawke's Hamlet shoots him through a closet door. Shakespeare intact, box office around $2 million. He was sad in iambic pentameter, too.

  2. An axe leaning against a chopped tree in the rain beside a bottle of wine, on a New England island.

    09. Moonrise Kingdom

    Wes Anderson · 2012

    Walt Bishop, lawyer, in a marriage that has quietly ended without telling him. During a storm he tells his wife he hopes the roof flies off and he gets sucked into outer space. It is the most Bill Murray line Wes Anderson ever wrote, and that is a crowded field.

  3. A garden hose spraying a patchy Brooklyn lawn beside a folding chair and a bottle of whisky.

    08. St. Vincent

    Theodore Melfi · 2014

    A broke, drunk Vietnam veteran in Brooklyn starts babysitting the kid next door for cash, and the movie goes exactly where you think. Jack Nicholson was rumored for it; Murray got the Golden Globe nomination. It is sentimental. He sells it anyway.

  4. A pair of muddy army boots at the foot of a Himalayan mountain path, prayer flags overhead.

    07. The Razor's Edge

    John Byrum · 1984

    Murray agreed to make Ghostbusters so Columbia would fund this Somerset Maugham adaptation about a WWI veteran seeking meaning in India. He co-wrote it. It lost money, and he left for four years to study at the Sorbonne. He got the sad roles ten years too early.

  5. A clawfoot bathtub with a small television on a stand beside it and an ashtray on the rim.

    06. The Royal Tenenbaums

    Wes Anderson · 2001

    Raleigh St. Clair, neurologist, studying a boy named Dudley while his wife Margot smokes in the bathtub for six hours a day. A private investigator's report tells him everything at once. Murray takes the news in a cardigan, with no change in volume whatsoever.

  6. A red knit cap resting on the porthole of a small yellow submarine in deep blue water.

    05. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

    Wes Anderson · 2004

    A washed-up oceanographer hunts the jaguar shark that ate his partner, with a man who may be his son and a crew member covering Bowie in Portuguese. The ending finds him in a submarine, quietly undone by a fish. Cost $50 million, made far less.

  7. An old clock radio on a bed and breakfast nightstand flipping to six o'clock, snow falling outside.

    04. Groundhog Day

    Harold Ramis · 1993

    Before the redemption comes a stretch where Phil drives off a cliff with the groundhog. Ramis guessed the loop lasted 30 or 40 years. He and Murray then went nearly two decades without speaking. Sad on screen, sad off, and still a perfect comedy.

  8. A pink envelope and a bouquet of wilting flowers on the passenger seat of a rental car.

    03. Broken Flowers

    Jim Jarmusch · 2005

    A retired tech millionaire gets an unsigned pink letter about a son he never knew, and his neighbor sends him to visit four exes. Murray barely moves his face for two hours and it is devastating. Won the Grand Prix at Cannes. He wore a tracksuit to most of it.

  9. A lonely lawn chair beside a swimming pool at a party, a cigarette and a can of beer on the diving board.

    02. Rushmore

    Wes Anderson · 1998

    Herman Blume, a steel tycoon who hates his sons and cannonballs into his own party pool in silence. Murray worked for scale, roughly $9,000, and offered a blank check for a helicopter shot Disney would not pay for. The start of his second career: sad men in nice clothes.

  10. A glass of whisky on a hotel bar at 3 a.m., the neon skyline of Tokyo glowing through floor-to-ceiling windows.

    01. Lost in Translation

    Sofia Coppola · 2003

    A fading actor in Tokyo to shill Suntory whisky, awake at 3 a.m. in the Park Hyatt. Coppola chased him for months and he never signed a contract. He improvised the final whisper, and she left it unheard. Oscar nod; lost to Johnny Depp as a pirate.

Honorable mentions

  • A mansion living room with a projector screen glowing and a dropped golf club on a white carpet.

    Zombieland

    Ruben Fleischer · 2009

    Murray plays himself, hiding in his mansion in zombie makeup, and gets shot for a prank. Asked if he has regrets, his dying answer is Garfield, maybe. It is the best cameo of the century and the most honest career review ever delivered on screen.

Dishonorable mentions

  • A cold half-eaten lasagna on a kitchen counter beside an unread script.

    Garfield: The Movie

    Pete Hewitt · 2004

    Murray said he took it because the script was by Joel Cohen and he thought it said Coen, as in the brothers. A co-writer disputes that. Either way, he voiced a CGI cat and later used his Zombieland death scene to apologize. The sadness here was ours.

Every list.
On tap.

No newsletter. Point your AI at our public MCP server, or follow the RSS feed. New lists show up in both.

Get the MCP RSS