Dir. Joe Roth
Intended as an elegant skewering of celebrity culture, America’s Sweethearts ends up too sweethearted for its own good. Which is a pity, given the wealth of talent on display: John Cusack, the thinking woman’s sex symbol, stars as Eddie Thomas, a major movie star whose on-screen partnership with Gwen Harrison (Catherine Zeta-Jones) stands in marked contrast to their pathologically dysfunctional off-screen relationship. Enter Lee Phillips (Billy Crystal), whose job is to seduce the reporters on the junket for the latest Eddie and Gwen movie into thinking the two are back together, and make those reporters forget that the director has refused to release the print of the movie. Lee ropes in Kiki (Julia Roberts), the recently-slimmed-down sister/minder to Gwen, to assist his cause, and of course Kiki and Eddie fall for each other. (That’s hardly giving anything away: if you expected something other than a Cusack-Roberts romantic pairing, you’d better brush up on your own Hollywood savvy.)
The mild comedic pleasures of seeing J-Ro in in a fat suit or Zeta-Jones playing the diva (ooh, stretch), or the great pleasure of watching Christopher Walken act, can’t conceal the fact that America’s Sweethearts merely skitters around the edges of satire, never quite willing to jump in (see Robert Altman’s The Player for a far more devastating take on Hollywood culture, or even Notting Hill, in which the divine Miss R pokes more fun at junkets). The movie hardly succeeds as pure romantic comedy either: the Kiki-Eddie love interest comes across as rushed, and their supposed big quarrel seems merely perfunctory.
So America’s Sweethearts survives on the warmth of the actors, each of whom, as real-life public darlings, has charisma to burn. But maybe it’s hard biting the hand that feeds you. Particularly one that feeds you so well.