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AMERICA'S SWEETHEARTS Send This Review to a Friend
An effort at screwball comedy with a satirical view of Hollywood filmmaking, stardom and critics and journalists lured by junkets, "America's Sweethearts" has its zippy, funny moments but not enough of them. The climax, in which romantic entanglements are ironed out in front of the world press with the scribes applauding the results, is so preposterous that one wonders how it ever survived in the script. That portion isn’t even successful as a barb that might characterize junketeers as a stupid, sheep-like lot. It's the situation that is just plain stupid.
But the film does have Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Billy Crystal, John Cusack, Christopher Walken, Alan Arkin, Stanley Tucci and, for good measure, Hank Azaria as a Spanish stud who pronounces the junket as "hunket." They make the film more bearable than it should be, given the uninspired level of the screenplay by Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan and some of the stiffly staged scenes under the direction by Joe Roth.
The premise involves the breakup of married stars Gwen Harrison (Zeta-Jones) and Eddie Thomas (Cusack) and the efforts of publicist Lee Phillips (Crystal) to get them together at a Nevada hotel for a press junket to promote their last film, "Time Over Time." The junket starts off without the film, since the celebrated, egotistical director Hal Weidmann (Walken) refuses to let anybody see it until he flies it there at the last moment. Meanwhile, Gwen's sister Kiki (Roberts), who dutifully works as the egomaniacal, insecure star's assistant, has been secretly in love with the unstable Eddie. He had a breakdown when Gwen left him for Hector (Azaria) and has been trying to pull himself together at a retreat with a guru-type "Wellness Guide" (Arkin), who dispenses such worldly advice as "Life is a cookie."
All this is a lot to play with, and there are such enjoyable moments as Julia Roberts costumed to look 60 pounds heavier before she slimmed down to look her beautiful, smiling screen persona. Zeta-Jones comically tackles her bitchy role with flair, and Crystal's portrayal of a press agent hits the mark on the extent to which he must be a master manipulator, plus doing a few comic shticks, like being nuzzled in the groin by a huge dog and starting to enjoy it, instructing his canine seducer "a little to the left." Tucci is funny as the worried producer Kingman, who wouldn't be adverse to a murder or suicide scandal if it would help publicize the film.
But a flatness pervades "America's Sweethearts" and the entertaining flashes don't coalesce into anything sharp or particularly witty. There was potential to do a more memorable, biting comedy, but the film never really takes off, meandering along instead with lifts by its performers and the occasional funny line or situation. A Columbia Pictures release.
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