America’s Sweethearts

The execs at Columbia must have wet their pants with greedy anticipation when the casting agents confirmed that Julia Roberts, John Cusack, and Catherine Zeta-Jones were on board with producer/writer/star Billy Crystal’s romantic Hollywood spoof America’s Sweethearts, not just for the star power draw but for what must have looked on paper like an ultimate conceptual cocktail of Hollywood superstars and insiders portraying Hollywood superstars and insiders in a manner both comic, romantic, and mildly satirical.

Of course, the reality of combinatorial star arrangement tends to resemble more art than science, more alchemy than chemistry. Just as 1993’s The House of the Spirits showed that combining critical darlings Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, and Armin Muehler-Stahl with a screenplay by celebrated novelist Isabel Allende could still result in a critically-panned movie, 2001’s Rush Hour 2 continues to prove that previous niche actors like Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, when combined properly, can create a $350 million franchise.

Despite the industry’s habit of ignoring the lessons of history, at least some of the caution that should have accompanied the creation of America’s Sweethearts seems to have seeped through. It should be said that among the four leads, three have been around long enough and endured enough transformations to know something about how promising star cachets can fail. Prior to Roberts’ recent triumph as Alpha-Woman with Oscar, she suffered through a half-decade where mentions in the press were limited to making fun of her attempt at an Irish accent (Michael Collins, Mary Reilly); Cusack survived an awkward transition from teen hero everyman to adult hero everyman with his wit intact; Crystal has been in the purgatory of semi-Jew one-liners for so long that he’s returned to writing. Zeta-Jones, though too new to be a veteran of anything except pre-nuptial agreements, does seem to know how to use being typecast to her advantage.

It’s probably not surprising then, that America’s Sweethearts comes across as an orchestrated effort to prevent anyone from playing against type. Crystal plays Lee, a publicist for a film studio which is so heavily invested in its upcoming release, Time Over Time, that Lee must forcibly or fraudulently reunite the film’s stars into the real-life couple that they were for a dozen previous hit films. Cusack plays star Eddie Thomas, a tilted, jilted over-wound but basically nice guy who’s still obsessed over estranged star-wife Gwen Harris (Zeta-Jones), an eye-candy narcissist with a new Spanish lover and a habit of abusing her assistant/sister, the humble, hard-working, undiscovered beauty Kiki – Julia Roberts. All four are brought together for a press junket at a desert hotel as they await the arrival of the film, which the possibly-insane director won’t let anyone preview except the press.

In other words, there’s little here that you couldn’t infer from the America’s Sweethearts poster, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While there’s much to be said for actors who try to expand their milieu a bit, here we have four that have apparently learned to be satisfied with their basic (and lucrative) appeals. And in that capacity, they’re quite good. Crystal mugs, Cusack clenches and twitches, Roberts glows from within and Zeta-Jones whines incessantly. The burden of surprise or twist is shouldered instead by an alternately inspired and lazy supporting cast of second-tier vets: Stanley Tucci is sharp as ever as the studio head, Hank Azaria heterosexualizes his Birdcage role as the Spanish lover, Alan Arkin yawns as Eddie Thomas’ guru, and Christopher Walken riffs a nice Terence Malick-esque parody as the director.

What fails is not the synergy of the main players, but the attempted synergy of tone. Ostensibly a parody about media couples and their effect on public reception of their art, America’s Sweethearts takes its comfortableness with itself so far that it loses any edge. The supporting cast, while funny, aren’t given meaty enough roles in Crystal’s screenplay to land much punch. Tucci’s studio head plays a few laughs as the cruel avarice, Arkin rolls his eyes conspiratorially when Eddie Thomas finally leaves his ashram, but rather than deepening any parody these bit parts glare like disjointed self-reference, thus painting what was supposed to be a celebrity parody as a strange parade of celebrity walk-ons. Walken, especially, gets wasted. His arrival at the junket with the secret film is the payoff that drives the film forward, but he too gets cast aside – as does most of what he brings in the film canisters – as America’s Sweethearts settles into an over-written, overworked ending that at best reflects the warm whimsy of the central plot but betrays the zany comedy promise of the movie’s funniest moments.

It almost seems that in the end America’s Sweethearts is an ambitious attempt to do nothing, except to lower the standards of a star-ensemble cast. There is arguably a thematic connection between a plot about audiences over-expecting their superstars to extend their screen romance to real life and teaching us to under-expect our superstars’ ability or desire to expand their art. It’s a stretch, too much of one to make America’s Sweethearts anything resembling an important movie about movies. But by the soul-deadening standards set by this past summer of Bangkok releases, it’s a more than reasonable place to get some entertainment, the kind that’s best provided by movie stars who, for better or worse, know exactly what they’re doing.