** (out of ****)
Starring Julia Roberts, Billy Crystal, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Cusack, Christopher Walken, Seth Green, Hank Azaria, Alan Arkin, and Stanley Tucci
Directed by Joe Roth & written by Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan
2001 PG13
“America’s Sweethearts” is one of those movies that I feel bad for not liking very much. It’s decently acted and competently made, but more than that it’s good-natured. If a movie is smug, mean, or insulting, then slamming it doesn’t feel wrong. But giving “America’s Sweethearts” a negative rating makes me feel like I’m hurting someone’s feelings. The movie isn’t consistently funny and, instead of revealing something new or interesting about Hollywood, it spends a lot of time on a love story that it really doesn’t develop properly. It relies too much on us wanting Julia Roberts to get together with John Cusack, but doesn’t give us much reason why.
Catherine Zeta-Jones and John Cusack star as movie stars, married off-camera and always falling in love on-camera. Their movies are always huge hits, but the couple seems to be on the verge of a divorce. The viewing public is in turmoil and shivers are running up the spine of their studio, which fears that Cusack and Zeta-Jones’ next film might flop if they aren’t still a couple. Enter Billy Crystal, a studio crony and friend of the couple, who promises the studio that he shall have the couple reunited in time for the movie’s opening. Crystal really doesn’t believe Cusack and Zeta-Jones will be happy together, and is only interested in them getting back together so the studio can make money.
(What “America’s Sweethearts” wants us to believe is that Crystal has “come to senses” when, near the film’s end, he encourages Cusack to break his wedding vows, leave his wife, and tell the world that divorce is the solution for our marital woes. So maybe the movie isn’t so good-natured after all.)
Trouble is, Zeta-Jones has shacked up with her new lover (Hank Azaria of “The Simpsons,” sporting a wild accent that allows him to say “honket” instead of “junket”). And, apparently, Cusack might be in love with Zeta-Jones’ sister and live-in slave named Kiki (Julia Roberts), although this kind of just pops out of nowhere in the last half of the movie. Zeta-Jones and Cusack are both neurotic, self-obsessed messes, and I think the point “America’s Sweethearts” is trying to make is that these glamorized celebrities need to be brought back to the real world now and again. The drama of Zeta-Jones, Cusack, and Roberts plays out at the press junket for their new film, which is held in the middle of the desert so that 1) the newspapermen can’t get word of what’s happening back to the real world, and 2) “America’s Sweethearts” can keep all its characters in one place.
The movie’s casting is a little bit intriguing. As far as I’m concerned, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Julia Roberts were both assembled in the basement of some movie studio. I don’t care how many times they appear on magazine covers, or how often Roberts is described as “the girl next door.” I don’t personally find either of them very attractive because they don’t strike me as real. So casting Zeta-Jones as a movie star is just fine, just like casting her as the murderous dancer in “Chicago” was spot on. But there’s something about Julia Roberts portraying “the normal girl” that’s so weirdly unsettling. Maybe it’s that no “normal girls” are named Kiki. As for John Cusack, after a career of playing an intellectual everyman, he’s also cast against type as a glamorous movie star, and doesn’t seem at home in the role.
If Shakespeare or Billy Wilder were still alive (wait…is Billy Wilder still alive?) they could take this situation and use it to examine fame and the man-woman relationship, and make it funny. But “America’s Sweethearts” isn’t so lucky. Christopher Walken, as the nearly deranged director of the movie-within-the-movie, is pretty funny, and Cusack has some fantasy revenge sequences that are amusing. But watching his histrionics over Zeta-Jones are not, his fistfight with Hank Azaria is timed clumsily, and the movie is a little too polite when it comes to satirizing celebrity. Compared to Robert Altman’s “The Player,” in which a Hollywood exec gets away with murder while waxing sadly over how art is overlooked in favor of profit, “America’s Sweethearts” is not especially pointed. The test of a romantic comedy is that we want the couple to get together, and the test of satire is whether it teaches us while being funny. “America’s Sweethearts” accomplishes neither. Sorry.
Finished April 10th, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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