America Sweetheart

This is a film on film people and their crazy, idiosyncratic life. Beyond the greasepaint, however, America's Sweethearts takes you into the heart of mainstream Hollywood avant garde—the tradition spreading from Billy Crystal and Tim Robbins (Rock The Cradle, The Player), of actors and celebrities getting together to give intelligent, funny cinema.

Gwen (Catherine Zeta Jones) and Eddie (John Cusack) are Hollywood's favourite stars, having consummated their screen persona into personal marriage. The film begins at the point where they have fallen out because Gwen decided to take a slobbering Spaniard to Eddie's adored love nest. This is how the fact of dumping a husband gets communicated on screen—instead of focusing on a quasi-serious view of the situation, director Joe Roth and co-writer Billy Crystal take a quasi-comic view of celebrity life. This gives them the freedom to create characters who comment upon themselves in a 'natural' acting style, based on gestures, which brings out 'the person you really are' kind of thing. Gwen is someone who appears obsessive about her screen image as a romantic actress. So much so that she even enacts her smallest moments of supposed genuineness—the girltalk with her sister, the mushy and manipulative moments with her estranged husband. But there is an underlying cuteness about her—a necessary tool used by the director both to halt her from turning into a bitch and to point out the playful complexities of a glamorous woman caught in so many roles.

Likewise, Eddy is also a star trying hard to come to terms with a basic simplicity of being (his love for a woman he was supposed to spend his life with) and his dwindling status as a star following the break-up. But he is also trying subtly to project the image of the wronged man forced to become a loony, and to get KiKi (Julia Roberts), his wife's sister. Kiki is one normal person in the madhouse which includes Crystal as a 'good natured' publicity man (he is also the story's narrator) capable of selling his mother's death for a film's promotion and a suave, square studio boss committed hopelessly to chicanery, rage and a businessman's humour. It also has as its last trump card a film-maker (Christopher Walken) who spends billions of studio dollars on a Godard-style honest, new wave cinema. This cinema films secretly the real life of actors, while they are doing a fictional movie, presenting that as the film. It precedes a raucous press conference where Gwen's Spaniard tries to prove he has a bigger dick than the one revealed in a filmed conversation between Kiki and Gwen. The incident strips appearances to bring out the real attitude, and motives, of people involved in relationships and social acts. That is if you look too deeply—for America's Sweethearts also stops at a snarl when the situation requires a bite. It is laidback and slack at places, allowing room for some of Hollywood's phonyness to creep in from the backdoor.