Are You Ready for the Summer?

There is a generally accepted golden rule of comedy: if you put Bill Murray in a film, it will be funnier than a movie without him. This is a rule that has been tested time and again, from Saturday Night Live, where Murray was brought in after the show’s first season and basically upstaged certain egotistical, big name performers (Chevy Chase). You could see it late in his career where Murray’s appearance in Zombieland was a highlight of an already funny movie. From Ghostbusters to Caddyshack, Stripes to Space Jam, Murray is the scene stealing delight time and again.

I think, however, we have finally found one of the few instances where that rule doesn’t hold fast. Meatballs in a 1979 film featuring a large cast of characters, but at the center of it all is Murray. The film is built around him, essentially set up as a vehicle for him, and even started the collaboration between Murray, Ivan Reitman, and Harold Ramis that would go on for several more movies (including the first two Ghostbusters films). It is also a painfully unfunny movie. I don’t know what audiences in the late 1970s were interested in about this film (which made $70 Mil against its $1.6 Mil budget and went on to spawn three Murray-less sequels), but whatever laughs they found have dried up and died in the decades since now and then.

Murray stars as "Tripper" Harrison, the entertainment director for Camp North Star, a summer camp catering to kids of all ages (from as young as 6 all the way up to 14, and maybe even older). Tripper isn’t the leader of the camp, that would be Morty Melnick (Harvey Atkin), but Trip is effectively in charge, coordinating the other counselors, engaging with the campers, and generally doing everything that doesn’t involve actual boring stuff like paying bills or handling paperwork. He’s there to have a good time with his fellow campers.

He also has an eye on finally winning the rivalry between Camp North Star and the rich camp across the lake, Camp Mohawk. That camp is a super expensive camp that caters to its campers every whim, more of a stand-alone cruise experience than a real camp. For the last fourteen years, Camp Mohawk has won every inter-camp event the two camps have hosted (often by cheating their way through the events), but this year Tripper wants that to change. Through goofy antics, and a bit of his own chicanery, Tripper will see Camp North Star come out on top once and for all.

Meatballs (the name of which comes from a one-off line deep into the film calling one counselor a “meatball”) is an underbaked film. It’s basically a series of loose little sketches and moments involving campers and counselors as they go about a single summer at the camp. Most of the moments involve Murray coming in, saying something mildly amusing, and everyone else looking at him like he’s the coolest, raddest dude on the planet. That includes almost all the other counselors (save one, who we’ll get to in a second) as well as all the campers. Whether what he says is actually funny or not is besides the point; the film thinks Tripper is hilarious.

And, in fairness, there are a few moments that do work. There’s a running gag that starts halfway into the film, where Tripper and the other male counselors will take Morty, fast asleep in his bed, and move him somewhere around the campground (bed, night table, and all), setting him up to wake up in strange places. This was pretty funny, as it went on, leading to a number of comical situations (but it did also lead to a pretty tragic moment near the end of the film that makes the whole joke feel cruel and far less amusing). And there’s also a plotline where Tripper takes a camper under his wing, Rudy Gerner (Chris Makepeace), and helps the kid through a tough bit of loneliness. I generally liked these moments as they gave Tripper something more to do than just try to steal scenes.

With that said, there’s a few moments that stuck out as decidedly awful, especially for modern sensibilities. There’s a C-plot about Tripper having the hots for female lead counselor Roxanne (Kate Lynch). He hits on her, pushes himself on her, and generally takes things way too far, especially as she says, repeatedly, “no.” There’s one instance where things go way too far, but before anyone can catch him in the act he flips their rolling mass over and pretends like he’s the victim. And then, late in the movie, for some reason Roxanne turns on to his charms and decides he’s a great guy, sleeping with him and then, by the end of the movie, going off with him to live together. It’s pretty gross.

I also have to point out that the rival camp, Mohawk, very much leans into their Native American name, with girls cheerleading the team with feathers in their hair, doing a “Mohawk Chop” with their arms. This, coming from an exclusively white camp in an exclusively white movie. I understand this is a Canadian production, but they have non-white people in that country, and First Peoples who could have said, “yeah, bro, this is all pretty uncool.” A simple name change, and maybe casting a couple of people of color for the movie, would have led to far less questionable material on this front.

I do recognize this was Murray’s first starring role in a film and he might have been working to get his feet under him. He’s doing his Bill Murray thing, but unlike on SNL where he could play off an ensemble that had the comedic chops to back up his plays, Murray has to do it all on his own here and he isn’t able to carry it off. This was also Reitman’s biggest directing job up until then, having only directed tiny, indie films before then, and Ramis’s second film script, after Animal House. Everyone here was just starting off, and it shows in the quality of this film.

At the same time, there is no covering for how little there is to this movie. For a film that clocks in at 94 minutes, not a lot actually happens. People wander around, a few awkward jokes are made here and there, and we get a lot of scenes of camp being camp. The main body of the camp is never well established, the rivalry between North Star and Mohawk only comes up when the film needs it to, and barely anyone besides Tripper, Roxanne, and Rudy gets any kind of real characterization or development. It’s a slight, threadbare film that, for some reason, people responded to favorably.

I have to assume that was just down to Murray, who had made a name for himself on SNL and was a rising star at the time. People wanted to see him in stuff, and this film was the launch of his whole film career. His inclusion in this movie turned it into a $70 Mil smash, and he then went on to have several years of successful lead roles earning hundreds of millions more. We all know this, but if you go back to this film to see where it all began, it’s hard to understand just why people felt Murray was comedy gold. Meatballs sucks.