Hoo Boy Is Billy Crystal's Unwatchable Vanity Project America's Sweethearts Ever a Stinkeroo!
truly a poster that says “These are the actors in this movie”
It will be interesting to see how evolving public ideas about power and abuse in regards to romantic and professional relationships will affect romantic comedies, a genre that regularly and irresponsibly posits acts of violent insanity and abuse as adorable romantic gestures.
In the surreally misconceived 2001 inside show-biz romantic comedy America’s Sweethearts, for example, Eddie Thomas (John Cusack) the male romantic lead, is so distraught to discover that Gwen Harrison (Catherine Zeta-Jones), his leading lady on- and off-screen is cheating on him with Hector Gorzongolas, one of Hank Azaria’s patented broad, mildly offensive caricatures of over-sexed foreigners, that he crashes a motorcycle through the window of the restaurant where his soulmate and her lover are eating.
Now you could argue that Eddie was simply trying to get to Gwen’s table as quickly as possible so that he could ask her firsthand if she was cheating on him with a costar, and figured that he could travel more quickly on a motorcycle than by foot, but it sure looks like an unhinged man tried to murder his partner and her lover in a frenzy of sexual jealousy.
You might imagine that nearly being murdered by her frequent costar and longtime romantic partner would officially and permanently liberate Gwen from having to do anything nice for her attempted murderer ever again. You would be wrong. America’s Sweethearts posits Gwen as the real villain. After all, she cheated on that poor man and drove him so crazy with jealousy and rage that he had no choice but to attempt vehicular homicide. All he ever did was nearly kill several people. So of course the movie is going to be on his side.
In America’s Sweethearts, it’s not Eddie who has to make amends but Gwen. At its most unknowingly toxic, Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan’s screenplay has Kiki (Julia Roberts), its female romantic lead, try to convince Gwen, her evil, Cruella De Ville-like sister, employer and emotional abuser that, really, she should be flattered by Eddie’s murder attempt, telling her, “He was just so in love with you that he flipped out!” It’s a good thing he wasn’t more in love with her or, in the movie’s twisted mind, he’d have succeeded in killing both her and the man she was cheating with.
In America’s Sweethearts, Eddie and Gwen are our nation’s favorite twosome, a contemporary Hepburn and Tracy (only, judging from what we see of their work together, terrible) who have starred in hit vehicles like Autumn With Greg and Peg (a witless riff on the screenwriter/costar’s own When Harry Met Sally), Requiem for an Outfielder, The Bench, Sasha and the Optometrist and a handful of other abysmal and fake-looking collaborations the filmmakers are merciful enough not to include excerpts of.
Then came Eddie’s kooky, good-hearted and extremely romantic possible murder attempt and Gwen publicly gallivanting about with Hector. Eddie is so broken hearted that he’s taken to hiding out from humanity in a New Age retreat run by Alan Arkin until he’s admonished to leave the womb-like safety of his getaway from the world and attend a junket for the final Eddie and Gwen movie.
The movie is being held hostage by eccentric, Hal Ashby-like auteur Hal Weidmann (Christopher Walken), who will not let the studio see his baby, instead promising to debut the film at the junket so that the cast, the press and the industry will all see it at the same time.
In the big, embarrassing public split between Eddie and Gwen, the public comes out overwhelmingly against a woman who was nearly murdered by her leading man and boyfriend. In a bit that epitomizes the movie’ weird, curdled combination of toothlessness and bizarrely tone-deaf mean-spiritedness, guest star Larry King is so angrily prosecutorial towards Gwen when she appears on his show that he stops just short of angrily hurling rocks at her while angrily accusing her of being a Jezebel, a harlot, a painted woman and a whore. In our world, the late Larry King was every famous person’s chummy friend and ally. In America’s Sweethearts, he’s a figure of Old Testament wrath and fury.
The movie shares King and the moviegoing public’s fierce hatred of Gwen. When Eddie tells Gwen, “You are the devil” he’s not waxing hyperbolic. If anything, he might be underselling her fundamental evil. Gwen employs her sister as her personal assistant not out of kindness or a desire to help her sibling but rather so that she can maintain psychological, professional and economic control over her and continue her reign of emotional abuse, something that stretches back to high school, when Kiki would break up with her sister’s many boyfriends and lovers for her, sparing her more popular relation the inconvenience.
Of all of the various iterations of Julia Roberts, perhaps the least compelling and convincing is the fake plain Julia Roberts. That’s the Roberts we get here, a faux-average nobody who just happens to have the looks, magnetism and charisma of one of the greatest movie stars in history.
How do you turn Julia Roberts into a mousy nobody? America’s Sweethearts sticks her in unflattering clothing, glasses and, for flashbacks, a distractingly unconvincing fat suit that just makes Roberts look like she’s melting.
Only Eddie sees beyond Kiki’s drab attire and unglamorous job to the ravishingly beautiful woman underneath. Thankfully, like everyone else in the world, Kiki isn’t too put off by Eddie’s near-brush with vehicular homicide or obvious serious issues with jealousy and anger. Heck, as Gwen’s sister and personal assistant, she knows better than anyone that if Eddie were to succeed in killing his frequent costar, he would be doing the world a tremendous public service.
Crystal costars as Lee Phillips, a brilliant Machiavellian publicist who sees, in a junket for a romantic movie starring famous onscreen and offscreen lovers who now infamously hate each other, a director who’s gone upriver and taken his footage with him and no actual completed film to show the press, the challenge and opportunity of a lifetime.
To help distract the press from the inconvenient absence of the movie that’s ostensibly being promoted, Lee helps orchestrate all manner of exceedingly public drama involving Gwen, Eddie and their respective lovers. His tactics aren’t always pretty, as evidenced by a major set piece involving Eddie attempting to remove the needles of a cactus from his pajama pants at the lush Hyatt where much of the film takes place, something that is misunderstood from a distance as the troubled thespian masturbating furiously in public.
Forget satire: America’s Sweethearts is a big, dumb, broad dad joke of a movie from America’s official Corny Uncle. It’d be a stretch to even call it a comedy, though Crystal is sure to fill the laughless but convoluted screenplay with instantly dated references to Backstreet Boys, Prozac and The Blair Witch Project and a dog fellatio joke that, in an all too characteristic illustration of the movie’s astonishingly poor judgment, America’s Sweethearts chooses to end on.
Crystal initially conceived of America’s Sweethearts as a vehicle that would reunite him with When Harry Met Sally costar Meg Ryan as Eddie and Gwen. That might have made sense, given their history together and Ryan’s actual longtime status as America’s cinematic Sweetheart but the movie desperately needs for the key roles of Eddie and Gwen bona fide movie stars with electric chemistry and a history together, onscreen and off. Think Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor or at least Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Instead it gets an appropriately chilly, hate-worthy one-dimensional villain in Zeta-Jones and a flailing, confused performance by a miscast Cusack that unwittingly highlights the Gen-X icon’s shortcomings as an old school movie star/box-office king.
America’s Sweethearts seems primarily concerned with establishing Gwen as history’s greatest, most transparently evil monster, then punishing her disproportionately for being ambitious and sexual and calculating and a woman. To that end, when Walken finally returns after an hour and a half long absence to premiere his “movie” to the press, cast, crew and public, it’s not an actual Hollywood movie as we recognize them but rather a secret documentary assemblage of behind-the-scenes footage illustrating, yet again, that Gwen is a horrible monster who brazenly cheated on poor, helpless Eddie and, even more unforgivably, seems to really enjoy having sex with people other than the one dude the movie and the universe angrily insists she must have sex with forever or be considered a terrible human being. What Weidmann delivered is not a “revolutionary” new kind of movie so much as a confused DVD extra.
Shaggy-haired Hal Weidmann, who is such a kook that he edits his movies in the Unabomber’s shack, brags that the almost assuredly illegal collection of outtakes, behind the scenes footage and spy camera footage he assembled and has the audacity to pass off as a motion picture in the movie’s climax constitutes nothing short of "Real life: the juice, the stink, the glory.”
It’s another detail that rings true. After all, all the best, artiest, most ambitious movies open with their director addressing the camera to talk to audiences directly about the greatness that they’re about to experience. America’s Sweethearts possesses one of the attributes Weidmann bragged about in great abundance. It’s not “the juice” and it most assuredly is not “the glory” but after twenty-one long years, Crystal’s charmless vanity project continues to stink.
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