America's Sweethearts
**
Cinema
Releases - October 19, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12. 102
minutes. Directed by Joe Roth. Written by Billy Crystal, Peter Tolan. Starring
John Cusack, Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta Jones, Billy Crystal, Hank Azaria,
Stanley Tucci, Seth Green.
"America's Sweethearts" is a comedy
starring John Cusack and Catherine Zeta Jones as Eddie and Gwen, the one-time
most popular onscreen couple in Hollywood. Now they've split up, and only
one movie featuring both of them has yet to be released.
The movie takes place over the course of a press
junket at a Las Vegas resort. Julia Roberts plays Jones's sister and personal
assistant, Billy Crystal plays a studio publicist, and it's the job of these
guys to make Cusack and Jones look happy in front of the cameras while all
sorts of mess is happening backstage. Cusack keeps having nervous breakdowns
and yearning for his former love; Hank Azaria, who plays Jones's boyfriend,
arrives at the junket to throw a lot of tantrums; the film that's being
publicised is being held captive by its eccentric director (Christopher Walken);
and a romance is developing between Cusack and Roberts.
There is so much going on that "America's Sweethearts"
is never boring, but it's still not very good. It has such an amazing cast
that we want to pretend it's better than it really is; Roberts is charming
as ever, Crystal is at his sardonic best, and I have never seen John Cusack
give a bad performance in any movie. The film is bright and attractive, and
it sure made a great trailer.
But the humour is too broad and obvious. The movie's
satire of the phoney 'quote whore' journalists who appear at junkets is more
or less on the money, but the Jones character is a completely overboard portrayal
of the behaviour of self-centred movie stars -- her body language makes it
look like she doesn't realise there's anyone around her, she gets her sister
to bathe her, and she actually says things like "Oh, it's so hard being someone
people just don't get over, and nobody understands!" She is so lacking in
redeeming characteristics that we simply get frustrated when the intelligent
Cusack character keeps saying that he can't shake his feelings for her; to
the screenplay's credit, he does at one point muse "How can you be in love
with a person when you don't even like them?"
It is the Hank Azaria character, though, who is
most astonishingly embarrassing. He is supposed to be Spanish, but ethnicity
was played with more subtlety in the days of minstrel shows, and Azaria sounds
like a cross between Mr. Bumblebee from "The Simpsons" and the Jose Imenez
sketch, as he squeals out lines like "Ju meen haim not hinbited to the
hunket?"
Inevitably there are some funny moments, and it's
worth mentioning one more time that this movie has an endlessly watchable
cast. But it's just too over-the-top. "America's Sweethearts" is superior
sitcom and inferior cinema.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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