MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Bob’: There’s No Shrinking From This Patient

“What About Bob?” (citywide) begins with a terrific sick-joke premise. A multiphobic schmo who bonds with his pet goldfish Gil and can’t make it through the day without tripping over his own neuroses ends up following his new psychiatrist around on his holiday.

With Bill Murray as the schmo and Richard Dreyfuss as the shrink, this ought to be a classic comedy. It’s far from that, but there are some laughs in it anyway. Murray and Dreyfuss have the kind of temperamental oppositeness that great comedy teams thrive on. Just seeing them together is funny: Murray’s bleary, hangdog doggedness is the perfect counterpoint to Dreyfuss’ persnickety hostility and fresh-frozen smiles.

Murray specializes in characters who are aggressively oblivious to the mess they are making, and his Bob Wiley is more oblivious than most. There isn’t a conniving bone in his body and yet, in the course of the film, he innocently sabotages the vacation of Dreyfuss’ Dr. Leo Marvin with pinpoint accuracy. He just can’t help getting in the way, until Leo himself starts to get a bit buggy.

Whenever Bob and Leo are in focus, the film (rated PG) has a cartoonish velocity. Leo, with his wife (Julie Hagerty) and two kids, Anna (Kathryn Erbe) and Siggy (Charlie Korsmo), has rented an idyllic lakeside New England vacation home. Even without Bob around, Leo is a nervous wreck. He’s scheduled to be interviewed by “Good Morning America” about his best-selling therapy guide “Baby Steps”; he considers the telecast the big break of his career. When Bob, who can’t bear to be without Leo’s soothing ministrations, turns up in town, Leo is flummoxed.

Not his family, though; they warm to Bob’s cloddy sweetness, while Leo skates on the knife-edge of his professional cool. Bob meanwhile is having the time of his life dancing around his phobias; he accepts even Leo’s outrages as love taps.

What gives the film its semblance of feeling is that, as Murray plays him, Bob really does blossom before our eyes. Leo’s therapeutic regimen--approaching your fears one baby step at a time--has a pop-psych buzz to it, but it really works for Bob. Leo imagines himself a great psychiatrist but you get the feeling he doesn’t quite believe in the efficacy of his own methods. He’s like a magician whose powers suddenly turn out to be real. But, instead of taking pride in his success, he’s furious; Bob’s newfound free-spiritedness only means he’s more available to horn in on Leo’s life.

It’s a funny idea to have a patient’s rehabilitation keyed to his therapist’s disintegration. But Franz Oz, who directed, and his screenwriter, Tom Schulman, don’t expand the idea; they soften it. After a fairly consistently hilarious first half-hour or so, mushinesss sets in. Leo’s family never questions Bob’s sanity; they regard him the way we are supposed to--as an angelic fool. And Leo’s control-freak’s vanity is made to seem as deranged as Bob’s phobia-mongering.

It’s the old it-takes-one-to-know-one routine, and it’s too pat and patronizing. Giving Leo a smiley, almost robotic even-tempered wife, and two troubled kids, is an extra way of demonstrating that the good doctor can’t take care of his own, and we don’t need the demonstration.

Schulman, who also scripted “Dead Poets Society,” probably couldn’t resist another go at squishy moral uplift. But any movie that plays around with mental illness--that turns Tourette’s syndrome, for example, where the afflicted person often blurts out obscenities uncontrollably, into a joke--is in no position to take the high road.

The filmmakers may not recognize that Leo’s comeuppance is a real comedy-killer. So is the movie’s ultimate message: that Bob makes everyone into a better person. Murray is such a comic wizard that he manages to make even this droopy folderol work, but it’s at the expense of the pushy egomania that draws us to him in the first place.

The filmmakers make fun of “Baby Steps” but they’ve made their own “Baby Steps” here, and it’s probably more bogus than Leo’s. We don’t need to see Bob’s beaming beatific face at the end in order to feel good about him. He had our good will the first time he walked into Leo’s office and, with soul-deep satisfaction, whispered, “I have problems.”

‘What About Bob?’

Bill Murray: Bob Wiley

Richard Dreyfuss: Dr. Leo Marvin

Julie Hagerty: Fay Marvin

A Touchstone Pictures presentation, released by Buena Vista Pictures. Director Frank Oz. Producer Laura Ziskin. Screenplay Tom Schulman. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. Editor Anne V. Coates. Costumes Bernie Williams. Music Miles Goodman. Production design Les Dilley. Art director Jack Blackman. Set decorator Anne Kuljian. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG.