America's Sweethearts Review by Beth Ann Griese

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Starring	Julia Roberts, John Cusack, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Billy Crystal
Director	Joe Roth
Year	2001
The Scoop	A romance story wrapped in a parody of Hollywood life. A popular movie-star couple has broken up, but has to live elbow-to-elbow again to promote their last movie. And her assistant is not-very-secretly-to-us in love with him. Predictable, but good for some laughs over popcorn and candy.
What it's worth		Matinee (Good way to spend a couple of hours.)

Eddie and Gwen's final film together is ready to be released. And in order to get it lots of press, the film's promoter, Lee (Billy Crystal), wants to feed rumors that Eddie and Gwen are getting back together. So he cajoles them into coming to the press screening. Along with Hector. And Kiki (Julia Roberts), Gwen's sister and long-suffering assistant who used to be pudgy and has always had a crush on Eddie. Oh, and Lee also needs to make sure the press doesn't notice that so far, the director hasn't given them a film to show yet.

Whew. That's the smallest nutshell I can fit the plot into. And for a screwball comedy, that's perfectly all right. There's an olympic-sized pool of joke material here to dive into: the shallowness of Hollywood and its stars, the despair of jilted and unrequited lovers, the barking pack mentality of the gossipy press.

About half of the time, the movie has a perfectly good time romping around its playground and we end up with plenty to laugh at. Witty one-liners fly and characters are put in silly situations (my personal favorite was the showdown between Eddie and Hector).

But the other half of the time, America's Sweethearts has a sad tendency to forget to be screwball and wanders too far into the romance and pathos. When it does, it slows down to convince us who we should be rooting for (just in case we didn't know that it was Eddie and Kiki), the jokes get broader and more trite, and the film loses its pace.

There are a lot of missed opportunities in this movie. The press, which should have been a gold mine of jokes, mostly just obligingly appreciates the gossip fodder and occasionally asks about seeing a movie. Azaria gives Hector everything he has, but instead of a smarmy villain to boo, he's so goofy that it's hard to tell why Gwen picked him as her fling. His lispy accent is so outrageous that he ends up sounding like a cross between Sylvester Stallone and Azaria's outrageously gay maid from The Birdcage. And the end of the movie tries to make everything neat and tidy, when in reality I couldn't have cared less about anything else being cleaned up as long as Eddie and Kiki limped off the screen together at the end. Who cares whether the press pack likes Eddie and Gwen's film when all's done?

Despite its missed marks, I still enjoyed the movie. You certainly can't beat the cast: Roberts is, as usual, loveable from the moment she walks on the screen; Cusack is in his best type as a nice guy befuddled by the cruel world; Zeta-Jones gives us a shallow self-absorbed twit to raspberry; and Crystal never fails to be a smart-aleck. It's sad to look back at the film and realize how much better it could have been, but it was good enough that I didn't worry over it too much while I was in my theater seat.

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