More topical about Hollywood celebrity culture than it ever intended — and perhaps a bit discomfiting right now for its uber-celebrity leading lady — “America’s Sweethearts” begins as a smartly promising, gently farcical comedy of manners and ends as sourly and haphazardly as the lives it is poking fun at. Repping the return of former Disney chief and current Revolution Studios head Joe Roth to a perch he occupied a decade ago behind the camera, pic is the ultimate in contemporary Hollywood self-awareness and, to its detriment, self-ridicule, even as it assembles the kind of cast perhaps only a studio topper could manage. While the premise of a studio-contrived reconciliation of the town’s biggest star couple (separated after being married to each other) in order to promote their latest co-starring vehicle is redolent with potential, this showbiz affair, first gracefully, and then desperately, tries to revive parts of various classic Hollywood comedy traditions from Preston Sturges’ on-the-road character adventures to Ernst Lubitsch’s elegant wars between the sexes to Elaine May’s brand of moxie. The list of influences offers only a sense of how far pic is positioned from the nearest gross-out comedy barf bag, and though toplining Julia Roberts ensures a fine opening tally, the emphatically mature (though never salacious) tone and style, plus uninspiring word of mouth, will dampen B.O. for the sort of in-crowd Hollywood comedy the public has never embraced.
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The project is best seen as the work of Billy Crystal’s various skills: as the writer of neurotics on the edge; as the actor who ensures that he both plays the slightly straight man and gets many of the choicest lines; and as the producer who can bring together the talent like his best nights as the Oscar show emcee. Crystal has almost become synonymous with Hollywood, its Borscht Belt roots and its knack for needling itself in some kind of endless, charity-sponsored roast.
But this is also why Crystal’s latest (co-written with comedy vet and “Analyze This” partner Peter Tolan, who has skewered TV as a main scribe for “The Larry Sanders Show”) is a comic dead-end of navel-gazing, infuriatingly shallow characters and uneven set pieces that range from the fresh to the ludicrous. Undoubtedly, several thousand folks from Burbank to Malibu will be fascinated and tickled by this movie about movie egos and sellers, but most of them will ponder, by the time the third act plays out, what went wrong.
Storybook opener, graphically designed in the mode of ’30s and ’40s romances, sums up the vivid Liz ‘n’ Dick-like joint career of Gwen Harrison (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Eddie Thomas (John Cusack), stars of movies that look even worse than several Taylor-Burton ventures and hardly have the whiff of verisimilitude. Top PR flack Lee Phillips (Crystal) has been canned by insecure studio boss Dave Kingman (Stanley Tucci) and told to hand over the reins to young Danny Wax (Seth Green).
Dave, though, has a huge problem, and he desperately needs the expertise of Lee — who has promoted Gwen’s and Eddie’s last six pictures — to solve it: Their latest $86 million biggie, a sci-fi time-travel epic titled “Time Over Time,” is being held under apparent lock and key by the movie’s hairy, unkempt, half-maniacal helmer, Hal Weidmann (Christopher Walken). Hal’s in final edit in the same cabin once occupied by Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and won’t screen it until the press junket.
Even worse, Gwen, who’s taken up with swaggering Spaniard Hector (Hank Azaria), isn’t talking to Eddie after his apparent attempt on her life with his motorcycle. In pic’s surest capture of the mindgames and wheedling that transpire on a backlot, Dave lures Lee in with the promise of his job back if he gets the stars together for the junket weekend.
While Lee kicks into promo gear, devising a remote Nevada desert resort locale to keep the press in tow until the mystery film arrives, he tries to gently coddle Gwen toward the idea of reuniting with Eddie for the junket. The flack’s real ally is Gwen’s sister and personal assistant, Kiki (Roberts).
Lee also must handle withering Eddie, who doesn’t look helped by a retreat at a “wellness” center run by his “guide” (played by Alan Arkin as a mix of Deepak Chopra and J. Krishnamurti). Eddie’s release from the retreat is negotiated by Lee, and through this establishing section, there’s the feeling of a strong comedy of observed behavior taking shape.
Once action leaves L.A., strength gives way to a bothersome weak string of situations, such as Eddie trying to catch a peek of Gwen at night at the resort, falling into cacti and being caught on security cameras in a badly compromised position.
Nonsense and seriously under-crafted farce begin to reign supreme, except for one promising development: Kiki, who even with the glowing Roberts playing her has gotten lost in this busy shuffle, catches Eddie’s eye and renews a spark he first felt when Gwen had split and Kiki was 60 pounds heavier. (Roberts in fattening makeup is the very picture of subdued screwball comedy.) After a night in the sack, though, Eddie runs to Gwen when she needs him — and the dawning recognition in Roberts’ eyes is not only the movie’s most human moment, but the promise of great things to come.
Sadly, after a fine knockabout scene where Kiki finally gets to vent years of frustration to both big-headed, empty-hearted stars, a comic train wreck occurs in the form of awkward rooftop hijinks with Cusack and Crystal, and especially, with a monumentally unfunny climax where Walken’s Hal — made up to resemble, in pic’s most bizarre touch, the late director Hal Ashby — arrives and presents the finished movie.
Beyond the problem of the comedy’s promise failing to deliver is the story’s muddy sense of whose tale it’s telling. While it’s wonderful to see stars operating in ensemble form, it is also more than curious that Roberts’ character, though finally arising as the central concern, is kept under wraps for so long. The result isn’t the case of clever narrative and theatrical trickery, though, but of indecision about who to turn to next, and even why, since Crystal’s Lee establishes such a canny, witty hero from the opening sequences.
Industry observers will surely pick apart “Sweethearts’ ” errors in accurately observing Hollywood life and business, for even granting farce’s license for exaggeration, the errors are legion: Hal would have to be the new Stanley Kubrick (whom he indeed cites at one point) in order to keep the film from the studio; Danny is obviously unqualified to assume a studio’s top PR post; Eddie would also have his own personal assistant, clever explanatory jokes notwithstanding; mega-stars like these, even ones who get along, almost never sit side by side for on-camera junket interviews; and on and on.
Taking the anti-star pose to the limit, Roberts visibly has the most fun in the cast with a role that positions her in a way to observe stardom itself, and she pulls it off with comic elan. Even though his writer side whittles down his own role, Crystal is in ideal mode as the backroom arranger, dealer and soother of frayed nerves. Zeta-Jones moves through the movie like a well-coifed ice queen, and as such she’s far too remote to care about for an instant, while Cusack’s Eddie is himself in too much of an identity fog to ever get to know well. Tucci and Azaria skillfully steal scenes and then exit, but Walken is badly mishandled.
Roth shows no signs of rust in his 10-year directing layoff, and his steady, almost waltzlike pacing is a welcome respite from insanely driven comedies. Production values are first class, capped by Phedon Papamichael’s glistening lensing and designer Garreth Stover’s elegant dressing of main locale Hyatt Regency on Lake Las Vegas. James Newton Howard contributes one of his rare subdued underscores. In a sign of more shameless promotion, several TV entertainment interviewers, including Byron Allen and Sam Rubin, appear in cameos.