I was in high school the first time I understood the significance of Eddie Murphy. Murphy had finished his first year on “Saturday Night Live” and a seventeen-year-old classmate of mine, who regularly trolled New York City nightlife, gushed about slavishly following Murphy and his entourage around the city. Murphy was lighting up the screen with what would eventually include an all-star roster of indelible comedy characters like Gumby, Velvet Jones, Mr. Robinson, and Buckwheat. But for my friend, Murphy’s talent was almost beside the point. While still a teenager, Murphy had become one of the world’s most famous celebrities.
It’s a theme as old as public entertainment and documentary film itself: The embodied tension between art and fame. “Being Eddie,” currently streaming on Netflix, enters this storytelling fray promising to give us a peek at the man behind the legend. The film is visually and structurally built around extended, present-day interviews with Murphy as he is seated in and walks through his ridiculously sprawling mansion. We travel the arc of Murphy’s life, from his humble family and stand-up beginnings to “SNL” and a movie career filled with peaks and valleys. Along the way, comedic royalty — Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Kevin Hart — drop by to genuflect as they describe Murphy’s singular role in the evolution of contemporary Black artistry and the American comic tradition.
For those who have only become familiar with Murphy in his later years and have wondered what all the fuss was about when he returned to “SNL” in an Emmy award-winning turn as a host in 2019, “Being Eddie” does a thorough job of describing the scale and range of Murphy’s achievements and the extent to which he dominated pop culture in the 80s. “Being Eddie” recounts Murphy’s genius for creating and inhabiting characters on “SNL” and in dozens of movies, and captures how unprecedented it was for a Black actor at that time (and since) to show up in a movie, thoroughly command each scene, and make complete fools of all white people around him, as epitomized by the unforgettable bar scene in “48 Hours.” “Being Eddie” also has some important things to say about how narrow the lane is for Black celebrityhood. At one point, the film comments on how Eddie Murphy was often publicly compared to and pitted against Richard Pryor, as if American popular imagination could only rationalize and withstand one breakout Black comedic talent at a time.
“Being Eddie” is so driven by Murphy’s present-day voice and perspective that you fully expect him to receive an executive producer nod when the credits roll. But unlike celebrity vanity projects like “Madonna: Truth or Dare,” Beyonce’s “Life is But a Dream” or the daringly self-disassembling “Aka Charlie Sheen,” “Being Eddie” rarely allows himself to be sufficiently inward-looking or vulnerable, even when discussing the death of his brother.
Murphy’s multiple romances, marriages, and divorces are vaguely referred to, but these personal relationships are never examined, much less detailed. He talks about how he has centered his family in his life, but his children are reduced to B-roll fodder without names or backstories. Even when given a chance to reveal why and how he fell so hard off the public radar for a period of time in the aughts, Murphy offers a vague explanation and largely leaves it to the viewer to fill in the blanks. In the end, Murphy strikes pensive and reflective poses and awkwardly laughs at his own observations, but rarely exposes much of himself. And other than making some bad movie choices and cringeworthy music throughout his career, the flaws and neuro warps that are essential features of any brilliant mind are seldom acknowledged.
Perhaps the most striking evidence that “Being Eddie” is a heavy redaction of Murphy’s life, and that his on-camera persona is largely self-engineered, appears when Murphy casually discusses how he made a conscious decision to change his laugh because he didn’t like how it was being used in the public realm. While it’s fair to say that his signature guffaw is easily caricatured — much like the tics he famously parodies in his own impressions of personalities like Stevie Wonder or Bill Cosby — Murphy’s newest chortle is an unrecognizable affect, as if he underwent a botched personality transplant.
“Being Eddie” documents that Murphy is indeed one of the funniest men and character transformers to ever walk the planet, but that skill feels skin deep. Even Murphy at one point seems to admit that while he built routines around his genius for mimicry, he never developed a sophisticated comic and socially observant voice before he was swallowed up by movie stardom. His suggestion that the Academy never awarded him an Oscar because of political remarks he once made tends to overstate the subversive threat that he posed and his accomplishments as a dramatic actor.
It would indeed be unfair to compare Murphy to Richard Pryor if not for the fact that Murphy made no secret of the fact that he studied and revered Pryor. They both eventually succumbed to film roles that were unworthy of their powers, but Murphy never fell victim to the self-loathing that led to Pryor’s slow roll to self-destruction. On the other hand, Pryor recorded taboo-busting and socially insightful stand-up and sketch comedy in the seventies and eighties. He issued poignant commentary on race and masculinity in America throughout his career. He slyly championed the labor and civil rights movements in “Which Way is Up.” Like Bill Cosby before him and Dave Chappelle after, Pryor, in spite of deep personal shortcomings, was not just humorous; he was an emotionally intelligent and revelatory humorist.
By the end of “Being Eddie,” you come to celebrate that Murphy is a Black man who entered the celebrity meat grinder right out of high school, side-stepped drug and alcohol abuse, pivoted to become a family-friendly brand, and emerged on the other end, intact, to tell the tale. God knows we can use more stories like that. But as Murphy is shown rattling around his mansion, browsing through old magazine clippings, and voicing shadow and hand puppets, you can’t help but sense his muted isolation. For what does it profit a comedian, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his comic soul?