Gwen & Eddie's Last Hurrah.(Review)

One reason European films can be more artistic than Hollywood ones is that the filmmakers are not indentured to the studio. There are no directives from the front office to clean up your act or change your ending. Two of the films discussed here had to submit either to market research or to the Disney people's caving in to censure from Washington.

In the case of America's Sweethearts, a test audience's voting for a comic rather than romantic ending makes scant difference to a film whose romance is without fire, whose satire is without bite, and whose comedy is without wit. Julia Roberts is Kiki, the formerly overweight frump, now 60 pounds lighter and seductive, secretary to her movie-star sister Gwen (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who, with her husband and steady costar, Eddie (John Cusack), has made a series of romantic comedies earning them the sobriquet America's Sweethearts.

Already the Billy Crystal-Peter Tolan screenplay rings false: The days of such syrupy appellations are long gone, even assuming that star couples could stay married long enough for a series. Gwen starts an affair with a hot Hispanic lover, Hector; Eddie, driving past, sees them dining together behind a restaurant's picture window. He revs up, and we get in rapid succession: plate-glass breakage, marriage breakup, and his nervous breakdown. Eddie is now in a New Age sanatorium run by a bearded "Wellness Guide" (Alan Arkin) who spouts inane maxims he himself does not understand.

The last Gwen & Eddie movie is about to be released, and Dave Kingman (Stanley Tucci), the panicky studio head, desperately needs a hit. He rehires his just-fired star publicist, Lee (Billy Crystal), to cajole the couple back together long enough for a weekend press junket at a fancy hotel in the Nevada desert, where the media hounds will see not only the film but also America's seemingly reunited Sweethearts.

The hot Latin lover pronounces "junket" as "hunket," thereby eliciting the film's biggest laugh. As Hector, Hank Azaria manages to be funny for a bit, but how long can you run on empty? By the time Eddie is on the hotel roof contemplating suicide, Azaria must shout "Jump!" rather than "Hump!"-showing that the movie lacks consistency no less than courage.

The film-within-a-film is helicoptered in by its hippie-genius director, Hal Weidmann (Christopher Walken, with shoulder-length tresses). To make this supposed masterpiece, called "Time over Time," into a putative joke, it has to be so much more ludicrous than America's Sweethearts as to be moronic rather than funny-which, I must admit, did not prevent my fellow previewers from laughing.

Eddie and Kiki begin to fall in love, which awakens the divorce-bound but jealous Gwen's interest in Eddie, and ignites the combustible Hector. The ensuing imbroglio is as old as-if not the hills, certainly the Nevada desert, and may leave you with a taste of sand in the mouth. Having given away the biggest laugh, I may as well throw in the second- biggest: a ferociously snarling Doberman that elicits frantic Crystal one-liners, even though it merely wants to glue its snout to Crystal's crotch.