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ISN'T SHE GREAT Send This Review to a Friend
No she isn't. Not in this misfire.
The she refers to the late best-selling author Jacqueline Susann, whom I once met for an interview over drinks. I came away with the impression that she was intelligent, attractive and personable, certainly not ditsy and vulgar. She would make an interesting subject for a film, given her rise to fame and fortune with writing frowned upon by the literati. Although allegedly about Susann, "Isn't She Great" has been turned into merely a vehicle for Bette Midler and it's a disgrace even as that. I won't even deal with the travesty of Nathan Lane's passing for Susann's husband and mentor Irving Mansfield.
Midler's portrayal is a one-note depiction of Susann as nothing more than a crass no-talent broad hungry for fame. Her writing of "The Valley of the Dolls" would seem to spring from near-illiteracy fused with depseration. The script, by the usually more astute Paul Rudnick, veers from Midler spouting vulgarities to standing by her favorite tree in Central Park and having idiotic conversations with God. Because Susann gets cancer and dies in the film, as in real life, there's straining for a note of poignancy. But the film is so trashy as to rob even that aspect of genuine feeling.
There are some moments of humor by default when a prissy editor played by David Hyde Pierce, tries against the odds to get the book into shape, but the gag soon wears thin. Director Andrew Bergman, very capable with the right material, tries to pump some spirit into the mishmash, but he's stuck with the wrong movie. If this is all they could come up with, the filmmakers would have been better off to forget about Susann from scratch and just create a picture for Midler about a totally fictional author. The writing might have been freer and funnier.
Stockard Channing earns some laughs as Susann's blunt pal. She would have been a better choice than Midler to play Susann. Midler's delivery shtick and her wiggling in tight-fitting clothes is all wrong for the character. Don't get me wrong--I usually like Midler. Susann's books were hardly great literature. But she would have had to work overtime to write a film as inane as this one. A Universal Pictures release.
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