Director: Joe Roth
Starring: John Cusack,Julia Roberts,Catherine Zeta-Jones,Billy Crystal
I’ve always been a sucker for romantic comedies, no matter how sappy or trite. My favorite spring movie was “Bridget Jones’s Diary”, and I even enjoyed that whole string of tepid Meg Ryan films at the beginning of the 90s. So naturally, when Billy Crystal announced that he was forgoing his Oscar hosting duties yet again to film a movie co-starring John “Lloyd Dobler” Cusack and reigning Romantic Comedy Queen Julia Roberts, I did a little happy dance and started counting down the days until it hit theaters.
Sadly, my waiting was all for naught. Despite the screen presence of Cusack, Roberts, and co-stars Catherine Zeta-Jones and Billy Crystal, “America’s Sweethearts” is a generic mess. It attempts to be a good comedy, romance, and industry satire all at once, and fails miserably at all three. The premise makes for an amusing read: In order to distract the press from noticing that a quirky director (Christopher Walken) has refused to screen his latest film until the final day of its press junket, publicist Lee Philips (Crystal) feeds them a story about the reconciliation of the film’s two separated stars. In reality, Eddie (Cusack) and Gwen (Zeta-Jones) can’t stand each other, so Lee enlists the help of Gwen’s sister/personal assistant Kiki (Roberts), who is (surprise!) secretly in love with Eddie.
Not that “America’s Sweethearts” is completely devoid of comedy. It does have its moments - all of the Eddie/Gwen films within in a film are hilarious, as is Christopher Walken as the film’s deranged (and tap-dancing) director. But when the movie’s biggest gags rely on recycled masturbation/dog sniffing crotch jokes that you can see coming from a mile away, you realize that you’ve seen this all before – and more cleverly done. Even more disappointingly, the film hardly tugs at the romantic heartstrings. The whole premise of Eddie’s falling in love with Kiki is that she – loses weight. What kind of a message is that? There’s no courtship or character development at all – just boom – they fall in love because it’s written in the script.
Neither is a particularly appealing character as well. Eddie is nothing but a mass of neuroses, and Kiki is a doormat that can only come into her own after she loses 60 pounds. A lot of attention has actually been directed to the fact that Roberts chose the role of the newly svelte Kiki and not glamorpuss Gwen, but really, it’s a no brainer. Ironically, it is Gwen who is the only character in the whole film that has any personality. A bitchy delight as the self-absorbed Gwen, Catherine Zeta-Jones spurns her “High Fidelity” co-star once again with aplomb.
“America’s Sweethearts” is the sophomore directorial project of Joe Roth, better known as the head of Revolution Studios. With all of the inside nurturing this project seems to have undergone, it’s a shame that it simply can’t pull itself together. All of the leads are wasted, and potentially funny bit players are underused (Stanley Tucci, Seth Green, Alan Arkin) – although if I have to hear Hank Azaria say “hunk-it” instead of junket one more time…
