Mean Season

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

WHAT ABOUT BOB?

Directed by Frank Oz

Screenplay by Tom Schulman

Into everybody's life someone like Bob Wiley (Bill Murray) is bound to fall. "Human Krazy Glue" is how Dr. Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss), the fallee in this hilarious case, describes him. For Bob is a classically needy nerd. Having no life of his own, Bob is desperate to attach himself to someone else's existence and draw psychic sustenance from it in great, draining gulps.

What better candidate than his newfound shrink? Leo seems to have everything, most especially an ego as massive as Bob's is minuscule. Looks like he ought to have plenty to spare for a destitute patient.

Shows what Bob knows. When he arrives, uninvited and distinctly unwanted, at the psychiatrist's summer retreat, he finds a family just this side of dysfunctional. For Leo is totally self-absorbed. He is too full of himself, his hopes that his new book will hit the best-seller charts, his dreams that an impending visit from Good Morning America will make him a media star. He has no thoughts to spare for a wife heading into terminal recessiveness and kids heading toward overt rebellion as they try to get through to their inaccessible dad.

To Leo, Bob is every horrid neurotic thing the good doctor has sworn to stamp out. But to Leo's family, Bob is the one thing Leo is not. He is available. For stupid fun. For off-the-wall counseling. For generally shaking things up. Murray, with his curious blend of pathos and aggressiveness, is terrific, and so is an acutely uptight Dreyfuss, never once copping a plea for our sympathy. At the end What About Bob? skids into silliness, but not before Frank Oz proves that he's a director with just the mean sense of humor these bland times desperately need. R.S.