One’s first impressions of America’s Sweethearts, the new comedy with Julia Roberts, John Cusack and Catherine Zeta-Jones, were not favourable. The ”making of” mini-documentaries on TV (while giving away too much of the plot) and the trailers did not give one a sense of how consistently funny it is — and that without relying on the standard idiocies.
America’s Sweethearts is still very much a mainstream Hollywood movie, but it is at a slight angle to the usual fare served up as comedy. It is not genitally and anally obsessed as the American Pies and Farrelly Brothers comedies are. Nor is it an example of the soft-hearted and soft-headed stuff that goes as romantic comedy. It may not achieve the urbane heights of something Mike Nichols could have made (well, there is only one of him, it seems), but it has more sophistication than one expected.
Perhaps that is because it is a look at Hollywood itself. Oddly, for an industry so entranced by money and hooked on egotism, Hollywood often comes up with very good examinations of its own workings. And, here, an area not hitherto explored is under the microscope: that tangential but essential space known as marketing or publicity. To be more precise, the media junket.
Billy Crystal, who produced and wrote America’s Sweethearts, plays a publicist who has to reunite two popular stars who have made for themselves a successful tandem career. They are the husband-and-wife team of Eddie Thomas and Gwen Harrison (Cusack and Zeta-Jones), the latest in a long line of romantic/professional Hollywood teams that had a peak with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and seems lately to have petered out with the likes of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
Trouble is, Gwen and Eddie are no longer on speaking terms. Gwen left him for a Latin Lothario (shades of Melanie Griffith leaving Don Johnson for Antonio Banderas?), and the shattered Eddie has rather lost his grip on life, submerging himself in a cesspool of bitterness and self-pity. Their latest film is, however, about to hit the screens — if the studio mandarins can only lay hands on a print. The reclusive director is keeping it under wraps until the last moment. So the publicist’s only option is to launch a major press junket at a remote desert resort and bamboozle the media into some enthusiasm for a movie they haven’t yet seen.
The Hollywood tradition of expert fakery both on-screen and behind the scenes is satirised with a very neat touch; Crystal’s script is both highly amusing and underpinned by a sense of authenticity. His own performance is relaxed and entirely believable. Zeta-Jones (clearly back in superb physical form after her recent child-bearing) is perfectly over-the-top as the egomaniacal star, and Cusack presents the anguish of her more sensitive husband with real sympathy and a lovely touch of understated humour. Cusack is now one of the few actors of whom one can reasonably assume that any film he is in will at least be worth seeing.
The most complex role, though, and perhaps the most endearing personality in the film, goes to Julia Roberts, who seems to be sensibly putting the Runaway Bride kind of pap behind her. She plays Kiki, Gwen’s sister and much-put-upon Girl Friday, a woman who has subsumed her personal ambitions in her sibling’s career and ever-escalating needs. As the difficult new situation unfolds, with the estranged stars in an uneasy new alliance and the publicity machine pursuing its own agenda, it seems an opportunity will at last arise for Kiki to get out from under her sister’s shadow and make a grab for what she herself really wants.
There are convicing emotions underpinning the laughs, which helps — they are not too much reduced to the usual Hollywood join-the-dots kind of schema. But the laughs are the main thing America’s Sweethearts has to offer, and that it maintains a consistent standard of humour throughout is something to applaud. Forget the advance publicity, which makes the movie look rather ordinary, and — if the trailers haven’t already given away all the best jokes — go and enjoy the spectacle of Hollywood laughing at itself. After the industry’s sanctimonious, confused response to September 11 (suddenly anything about terrorism or any film showing the twin towers is taboo), such self-satirising humour is welcome light relief.