RAW
With Eddie Murphy.
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More than anything else, Murphy comes across as pathetic, a terminally undeveloped child forever seeking a shortcut to adulthood. The little vignette that opens the film features an episode–supposedly drawn from Murphy’s childhood–in which he shocked his family and their friends by telling an extended scatological joke. This kind of confessional reference to the source of one’s humor is supposed to have a disarming effect, but it almost never works satisfactorily. (Richard Pryor’s nonconcert films, for example, can be read largely as emotional autobiographies, yet virtually all of them are artistic failures.) This doesn’t mean there can’t be noteworthy revelations in such references, and Murphy does find some in the only person who laughs at his younger self’s dirty joke. The shocked silence of the grown-ups is disturbed by the chucklings of the one hipster among them, a stereotypical street type incongruously placed in a middle-class setting. This is obviously the type that Murphy wants to please: the one adult who combines the license of age with the irresponsibility of youth.
The middle section of Raw is devoted to Murphy’s observations on romance, marriage, and sex, and it is an unbelievable performance–literally. This is Murphy at his most jejune. He kicks off his off-kilter remarks on marriage by mentioning an article in the National Enquirer on Johnny Carson’s divorce settlement. This bit of matrimonial scripture forms the basis of all the jokes to come–which reveals something truly awful about Murphy. For one thing, he’s stealing another comedian’s routine: Johnny Carson has long used his own divorces as joke material. Worse, Murphy apparently believes what the Enquirer says, and, what’s sillier, builds a whole worldview on it. Murphy spends considerable time joking about community property laws and claiming that all a rich woman has to do is “fuck her husband” for a living. This could be funny if it was the remark of some rich comic divorcee, delivered with at least a trace of irony. But Murphy seems to think that this is profound. It’s like listening to a vulgar parvenu.
