"America's Sweethearts"

We want to see Julia Roberts and John Cusack together, but this mostly terrible romantic comedy forgets the part where the leads fall in love.

By Charles Taylor

Jul 20, 2001 | In the great romantic comedies, falling in love is never about abandoning yourself to some fluffy romantic daydream. It's about embarking on a journey that is going to demand meeting one challenge after another, work that can be both hard and painful -- sort of like love itself.

In the classics, like "The Lady Eve," if the pain of love comes through in comedy even more forcefully than it would in drama, it's because it filters out of a stylized, idealistic luxe surrounding. The opening of "The Lady Eve," for example, takes place aboard an ocean liner, a floating art deco playground with Henry Fonda in whites and tans, all primed for a shipboard romance. He finds it, only to have his heart broken by Barbara Stanwyck. In the first sensible thing he does in the whole movie, he heads to the bar and orders straight scotch. It doesn't matter that it's breakfast time, or that it burns all the way down and tastes like gall to him. He doesn't expect to enjoy it.

It's also breakfast time in the new "America's Sweethearts" when Julia Roberts has her heart broken. But instead of heading for the Dewar's, she heads for the breakfast buffet, goes off her diet with sausages and pancakes and waffles, and then gets daintily sick.

It may be unfair to compare "America's Sweethearts," which is just a disappointment, with the greatest romantic comedy ever made. But from the opening shot -- a leatherbound scrapbook with the movie's name engraved in gilt, a shot meant to recall studio movies of the '30s and '40s -- the movie sets itself up for the comparison. And considering what passes for romantic comedy these days, "America's Sweethearts" isn't all that bad. It has a better-than-average cast, a snappy, promising premise and several gifted crazies among the supporting cast.

Yet it's mostly terrible. The movie has no sparkle, no charm, nothing to sweep us off our feet. There are good bits and flashes of real nuttiness -- like the inspired notion of casting Alan Arkin as an Indian guru, his Jewish Everyman shrug transformed into serene Deadheaded acceptance of the universe -- but after a while, I began to resent sitting in my seat like a beggar waiting for crumbs.

The premise of the movie is that Hollywood's leading romantic couple -- both on- and off-screen -- have broken up. Eddie Thomas (John Cusack) and Gwen Harrison (Catherine Zeta-Jones) are megastars who make movies that, to borrow a phrase from Terry Southern, are all smash at the box. But when Gwen dumps Eddie for Hector, a Latin gigolo (whose macho posturings are undermined by Hank Azaria, giving the character a silly little Castilian lisp), and starts making movies on her own, they all tank.

There's one last Eddie and Gwen movie in the can. After releasing a string of flops, the studio head (Stanley Tucci) is banking on it to save his job. He promises the already-fired movie publicist Lee Phillips (Billy Crystal, who co-wrote the script with Peter Tolan) that he'll give him his job back if he can, during the movie's upcoming press junket, convince the public that Eddie and Gwen have gotten back together. The people will go see it, he figures, if they think Gwen and Eddie are in love again.

There are hitches. The picture's mad-genius director (Christopher Walken, in a long salt-and-pepper wig and Hollywood hippie duds) has hijacked the film and refuses to let anyone see it before the junket screening. And on the junket, love-struck Eddie, who's been at a "wellness center" for several months because he hasn't gotten over Gwen, suddenly falls for Kiki (Julia Roberts), Gwen's sister, personal assistant and gofer.

Or at least that's what we're told happens. The problem is, we never see Eddie and Kiki falling in love. There's a flashback with Eddie drunkenly kissing Kiki, who was 60 pounds heavier at the time. It seems meant to convey the first inklings of romance, though it doesn't read as anything more than a clumsy pass. And when Eddie sees the newly svelte Kiki, he greets her affectionately like an old friend -- there's no desire. That's what characterizes all of Cusack and Roberts' scenes together: We never see longing or even buried attraction. It may be that they haven't been given the scenes to develop it, but there's no chemistry between them.

The cuckolded Eddie knows that Gwen is a snake wooing him here for the good of her career, but that doesn't translate into his realizing that Kiki is the woman for him. There's a good bit the morning after Eddie and Kiki spend the night together and murmur endearments with a blanket held over their mouths to protect each other from morning breath. But the movie is so coy that there's no telling whether they've actually had sex. (They're both in T-shirts and bottoms.)

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