America's Sweethearts
Rated PG-13 for language, some crude and sexual humor.
reviewed by Christopher Lyon
With the best cast for a movie in years--especially a screwball romantic comedy--I really expected to enjoy “America’s Sweethearts” a whole lot more than I did. And because of the cast--Julia Roberts, John Cusack, Catherine Zeta Jones, Billy Crystal, Hank Azaria, Seth Green, and Christopher Walken--the movie isn’t hard to watch. It just always feels like it’s not as good as it should be.
Based on a story developed by Billy Crystal, Cusack and Jones star as a celebrity couple, Eddie and Gwen, who made a string of successful romantic movies together until she dumped him for a Spanish guy with a hilariously strange accent (Azaria). Now, as their last film together is about to open, the movie’s publicist, Lee (Crystal), is trying desperately to make it look like they’re getting back together so people will want to see the film. Unfortunately, Gwen is completely self-absorbed and Eddie’s been driven to pill-popping depression by his anger/love for Gwen.
To get them together, Lee talks each into coming to a press junket way out in the Nevada desert (so they and the press can’t leave). Then he gets Gwen’s sister/assistant Kiki (Roberts) to help him push the two together in front of the cameras. What he doesn’t know is that Kiki is secretly in love with Eddie.
You get the idea that “America’s Sweethearts” was supposed to be a big, over-the-top, screwball comedy about what goes on in the private lives of Hollywood stars and the business of selling movies. Unfortunately, it never goes over the top enough to be outrageously funny. But it goes too far for you to really connect with the characters. Everyone on screen comes off as pathetic and egocentric--or heartlessly devoted to making the movie a success at any cost. It’s even hard to like Julia Roberts’s character, who has so little self-respect that she won’t stand up to Gwen belittling treatment. (Even Julia’s smile doesn’t light up the screen as much as it normally does.)
So the laughs come sporadically, intermixed with occasional chuckling. Hank Azaria as “the Spaniard” does bring the funny when he’s on screen (though he’s pretty crude). But by the time you get to the end, you don’t really worry (or care) about who will end up with whom. The best scene comes when the movie-within-the-movie is finally seen for the first time. If the whole film had been like that movie, “America’s Sweethearts” would have been much more satisfying.
The film features plenty of bad language and crude sexual dialog (though there’s no sex shown). And the only worldview message I could find was that Hollywood is a fake and shallow place populated by self-focused and greedy people. The movie mocks those people and values—which is fine with me. I just wish it had mocked them in funnier ways.
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