A Course Called Ireland is a new documentary in which Bill Murray plays golf on the “Emerald Isle” while reflecting on everything from his great-grandmother to worms. The heart skips a beat. Bill Murray? The same Bill Murray whose genius for the odious wounded was so magnificently displayed in Groundhog Day and Lost in Translation? Yes, the same Bill Murray.
A montage of upcoming attractions does little to dampen the enthusiasm. Here’s the 76-year-old actor taking off amid the stunning greenery of County Kerry. Here he watches the “hard-working Irish worms” that roam the fairways of the Cork coast. And here he’s saying “hah-hah” in a variety of other golf-adjacent locations while surrounded by locals whose body language suggests that they, too, are saying, or at least thinking, “hah-hah.” We prepare our jaws for the cavalcade of bittersweet laughter that will inevitably follow.
But what is it? A shadow falls over the first moments of the first episode and, from a dark door, emerges a pensioner dressed in a padded raincoat. It’s about Margaret, a little Irish girl who crosses paths with Murray (“You were in the Ghostbusters!”) during his visit to the port town of Cobh and, for reasons which probably involved the phrases “local color” and “cheaper than hiring a professional”, is subsequently employed to narrate the first episode. Can Margaret’s bemused giggles make up for her inexperience? No, she’s horrible. Still, she’s here now, so we might as well let her continue. “This show isn’t about golf,” she shouts at footage of a golf course. “And it’s not really about Bill Murray,” she adds of the Murray images.
What East Is this about it, Margaret? It’s “the Irish,” she says, uncertainly. “Sort of.” And it’s about the Irish. Sort of. But that’s not what the series is Really about. A Course Called Ireland is really about what happens when a TV production implodes like a machine-gunned meringue because it hired a celebrity who doesn’t want to do what they were hired to do. It’s also about what happens when producers, sensing calamity, let the apparent whim of said celebrity dictate the tone of the production, then become frustrated with the results and overcompensate with effortless “weirdness” and a soundtrack of themed pub violins so hysterical that they seem forever on the verge of Riverdancing itself on the edge of the nearest cliff.
The horror begins in County Cork, with a largely uncommunicative Murray touring various golf courses and pubs with his friend – and author of the book on which this six-part travelogue is based – Tom Coyne. Murray doesn’t want to do what the producers want him to do. This includes discussing the history of Irish storytelling (“It’s not the fucking Bill Murray show”) and climbing a flight of stairs (“No”). I guess those breaths were left in the edit as an explanation/excuse for the bullshit that followed. “Look what we had to go through! “” is the subtext, a cry for help that would have been more poignant if someone from the production company had bothered to type the words “Bill Murray, reputation for prickliness” into Google before signing it. But no. So we have to endure countless near-silent car rides, lengths of golf courses, tense encounters with local eccentrics, and Margaret’s increasingly desperate efforts to pretend that everything is fine (“just try to have fun!”), all punctuated by glances from a man who looks like he wants to be somewhere else.
There are brief moments of respite. Murray is attentive to his Irish heritage (his great-grandmother left Ireland for Chicago in the 1850s) and is charming with his well-wishers. But then the producer asks him for his opinion on, say, Irish poetry, and the bow tie stops spinning and the shutters fall at the laugh factory.
Why did Murray agree, I wonder? Guinness? The worms? I fear the answer – as well as the meaning of this extraordinarily irritating series – has been “lost in translation.”
Gn entert
