"Ghostbusters" is as silly and as flawed as its creators, but it is as iconic as them, too

Rating: 7/10 (7 October 2014)

"Ghostbusters" is a Three Stooges short by way of National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. Nearly every Stooges routine saw the bumbling trio dressed in the garb of some profession, exterminators one day, delivery men the next, in order to get them through the client's door and into the room with the fine china, which they would promptly dismantle in slapstick fashion. The Stooges as "paranormal investigators" could only have been a matter of time. In "Ghostbusters" Bill Murray's Dr. Venkman is the Moe of the operation. To him it's all a scam, a way to meet and impress women. He thinks he's savvier than the others, but we know that the alpha Stooge is still a Stooge. The other two, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, are both straight-faced Larrys, because Curly is a one-of-a-kind. Aykroyd and Ramis are easily cowed but earnest, and could almost pass as intellectuals. Then a third Larry is added, Ernie Hudson, or maybe he's a Shemp. Or maybe the analogy breaks down. In any case, much of "Ghostbusters"'s humor is as old-fashioned and corny as that of the Stooges. "We should split up." "Good idea, we'll do more damage that way." This tried-and-true joke is followed by the Ghostbusters' destruction of a ritzy dining room in front of a gaggle of horrified blue-bloods, just like the Stooges used to do.
At the same time, a great deal of "Ghostbusters"'s humor is rooted in its characters. The script's very dry lines are not brilliantly funny in their own right. The famous ones, like "Don't cross the streams" and "Are you the key-master?" make little sense out of context. But they become funny and quotable because they issue from the mouths of well-drawn characters like the professorial Ramis, the dweebish Rick Moranis, and the comically-sultry Sigourney Weaver. Coauthors Aykroyd and Ramis exhibit a knack for writing these distinctive voices, and the film is perfectly cast even though Murray and Moranis were originally meant to be John Belushi and John Candy.
Yet two of the most celebrated of this group of 80s entertainers are double-edged swords. Murray's comedic persona and Ramis's work for Lampoon are characterized by condescension as much as self- deprecation, and they have down-punching impulses that color the comedy of "Ghostbusters." The Stooges never displayed anything like a "frat boy" mentality. Venkman's gender-specific mockery of a female-bodied demon toward the end of the film may be in character, but it feels as if we're expected to laugh with him rather than at him as we've mostly done up to this point. To do that would require us to find slurs against women humorous for their own sake, and only the grossest and most simple-minded opponents of political correctness laugh just because a woman is called a bitch and a minx. The dialogue here is tonally wrong and mars an otherwise glorious climax.
Aykroyd is a different matter. Though he gained fame alongside the infamously misogynistic Belushi, he was perhaps the least smarmy of the early SNL cast. He plays his "Ghostbusters" role with an almost touching naivety that is perhaps to be expected in light of his real-life passion for the paranormal. Perhaps it is his influence on the screenplay that accounts for Venkman's cynicism dropping away unremarked after two scenes. And perhaps it is his belief in the otherworldly that informs the casting of a government agent as the chief obstacle to the truth. Such plotting is extraordinarily silly, albeit in a different way from the characters' Stooge-like silliness. But when it works, it is equally charming.