Being Eddie 2025 Movie Review
The most interesting thing about the sanitized, fully authorized celebrity biodocs that have been mass-produced during the streaming era — sometimes the only interesting thing about the sanitized, fully authorized celebrity biodocs that have been mass-produced during the streaming era — is that they offer an unusually clear glimpse at how the famous like to think of themselves.
Often just candid enough to be described as “refreshingly honest” (as Netflix’s editorial site declares the company’s own portrait of Sylvester Stallone), these feature-length exercises in reputation laundering don’t give us a peek behind the curtain so much as they invite their stars to remap their private lives onto a stage that gives them full control of the spotlight. If you don’t want people to know who you really are, one of the smartest things you can do these days is to star in a slickly produced documentary about yourself so that people feel like you’ve already told them.
On that score, Angus Wall’s super watchable “Being Eddie” is among the more convincing films of its kind, because instead — or by way — of trying to show us who the real Eddie Murphy is, it commits itself to arguing that Murphy has always known. Indeed, the doc goes so far as to suggest that Murphy’s acute self-knowledge is his single most defining trait; that he’s only become somewhat inscrutable to us over the years because our perception of him has fluctuated so much more than his perception of himself. He’s changed a bit along the way, of course (to the point that he now sees the young stand-up comic on stage in “Raw” as a completely different person), but the highs didn’t break him, and the lows didn’t either. As “Trading Places” director John Landis puts it in one of this film’s uncommonly insightful talking head interviews: “Eddie has solid middle-class values, and he’s too vain to destroy himself.”
Murphy agrees with that assessment. “My biggest blessing is that I love myself, and that I knew what I wanted to do really, really early,” he says while leaning back into one of the ~412 different couches that line the sprawling Los Angeles mansion he shares with his (briefly glimpsed) wife Paige Butcher, and “Being Eddie” backs him up on both points. Determined to become the next Richard Pryor by the time he was 10 years old (“I wanted to be funny like Richard and cool like Elvis”), Murphy was so locked into his mission from such a young age that he became one of the ’80s biggest stars without snorting even a single line of coke — in stark contrast to his hero, who was forced to drop out of “Trading Places” after he set himself on fire amid a rum-soaked freebasing session.
He doesn’t drink. He had his first joint at 30. He is never the life of the party, which might explain why he was so frustrated that his girl likes to party all the time. All of the arcade cabinets in his game room work perfectly, unlike Jamie Foxx’s spray-happy bathroom sink, which he leaves broken in order to allow some funniness to seep into his otherwise enchanted life. Murphy’s favorite thing to do is to binge watch “Ridiculousness” at home (he compares the MTV franchise to the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky), and when the doc inevitably reaches the part about how the disaster reception to “Norbit” cost him the Oscar for “Dreamgirls,” he insists that he was only mad because the Academy made him leave the house for nothing. Murphy describes himself as “a simple guy,” while good friend Dave Chappelle prefers to think of him as “unscathed.”
Unscathed maybe, but not invulnerable. On the contrary, Murphy proudly identifies as an extremely sensitive type, insisting that sensitivity — as opposed to sheer talent — has been the biggest reason for his success as an artist. That sensitivity has cut both ways. As an upstart comedian it allowed him to be ahead of the culture; to see Hollywood’s blind spots as clearly as Axel Foley could spot a shotgun at a strip club, and to recognize how a brash young Black kid could turn the entire country on its head by staring its true complexion straight in the face. As a 34-year-old icon whose “Vampire in Brooklyn” inspired David Spade to make a single joke at his expense during “Weekend Update” (“Look children, it’s a falling star”), Murphy’s sensitivity caused him to turn his back on “SNL” for almost 25 years.
So eager to display its access that the documentary’s opening shot pilots a drone right through the retractable roof of Murphy’s estate, and even more eager not to lose it, “Being Eddie” lets its namesake set the terms for his own successes and failures. Murphy is justifiably proud of himself for belonging to “the first generation of Black overachievers,” and he never hesitates to pat himself on the back. “I can’t think of another actor — a comedic actor, a dramatic actor, Black, white — who’s done more different types of things,” he says. But, as might be expected of a man who actively changed his signature laugh because he felt like it was getting in the way, he always hears what he sounds like when he talks about himself. “I was even a rocket ship,” Murphy continues as part of a self-flagellating reference to the 2008 disaster “Meet Dave.” “And to all the young actors, I like to tell them ‘Don’t ever play a rocket ship.’”
Murphy acknowledges that he was churning out a lot of shit in the “Meet Dave” era, but this documentary, which happens to be produced by the company responsible for last year’s “Beverly Hills Cop” legacy sequel, makes sure to insist that the actor is on another hot streak (“Being Eddie” also includes a quick mention of the actor’s upcoming George Clinton biopic, which Bill Condon is slated to direct for Amazon MGM Studios). Still, there’s a certain solipsism to how he presents himself here.
On the one hand, Murphy rightly places himself alongside the most transformational Black entertainers of the 20th century, and points out that he’s been a trailblazer for so long that he paved the way for Morgan Freeman — Morgan Freeman! — to have their own success. On the other hand, Murphy is also quick to fall back on the classic “I just want to make people laugh” routine whenever things get too heavy, which can imply a lack of introspection at odds with his self-knowledge. The documentary’s funniest moment stems from Murphy downplaying the nuances of his own image, as film critic Elvis Mitchell pops up to articulate the metatextual significance of a scene from “Beverly Hills Cop,” only for Murphy to jump in and explain that he was just laughing at a stupid face one of his friends made off-camera.
Still, the takeaway from that edit is less “I’m oblivious to my own signifiers” than it is “I know myself better than even the sharpest viewers ever could.” Does that make it any less frustrating that “Being Eddie” almost completely elides Murphy’s wife and children, and — a sweet aside to his late brother Charlie notwithstanding — makes no mention of the more difficult episodes from his personal life? No, not at all. But the point here isn’t for us to know who Eddie Murphy is, it’s for us to know that he does. And so we’re left with the sight of him flipping through the pages of a tabloid magazine that’s all about him. “What a life I’ve had” he laughs.
