Isn't She Great Reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Isn't She Great - No Question

Isn’t She Great is a pile of rude, vulgar, glitzy, trashy, flashy crud, but just about the most fun of any crud I’ve encountered in a long time. What do you expect, with Bette Midler playing soft-porn queen Jacqueline Susann? I’ll tell you: expect to laugh. This is not a film about great writing, and it is not a film that depends upon great writing. Scriptwriter Paul Rudnick, after all, is best known for The Addams Family and Addams Family Values. It does depend upon two or more great performers, Bette Midler and Nathan Lane as Susann’s husband/agent and most importantly friend, Irving Mansfield. As much larger than life as both of these two are, they nonetheless cooperate with a stellar cast so that there is a sense of an ensemble at work. Stockard Channing plays Susann’s pal, John Cleese, her publisher, and David Hyde Pierce (who once more puts the angles into Anglo-Saxon), her editor.

Midler/Lane as the Susann/Mansfield couple at the center of the storm create a subtle chemistry based on the affection rather than the passion that the two characters (at least, as portrayed in this film) share, affection with a hearty dose of humor. But the film is not all laughs. The couple’s autistic child, Susann’s cancer, and the stress that Susann’s success puts upon their marriage are major aspects of the plot. In fact, the film seems to sprawl with as little discipline as Susann’s prose or heroines, leaving us at times as unsure of its intentions. What is this? Tragic? Comic? Tragicomic? But since it comes in at under a hundred minutes, all these different directions give it a hearty exuberance rather than flaccid over-development.

Lane and Midler are in almost every scene, their characters playing mutual respect and need against the loveless fringe of show business and publishing. No matter how desperate they are for her fame, for the "mass love" she desires, they never exploit anyone... else. Since Susann’s acting career is going nowhere, Mansfield comes up with the idea that she write a book (with pink paper and pink typewriter), a book she crams with sexual details that, as Mansfield exclaims, not even Shakespeare ever thought of.

Considering that this is a film about Jacqueline Susann starring Bette Midler, the language is relatively mild. There are no sex scenes; neither is there any of the drug use that was so much a part of the lives of Susann’s characters (and, so it is written, of her own life). In fact, this film is downright gentle. Burt Bacharach contributes music that sets the tone and the period, the latest manifestation of avery welcome Bacharach revival. The costumes look just as bad as I remember clothes from that period looking; keep one eye out for John Cleese, whose gear (as it used to be called, young’uns) will knock both eyes out. Jim Morrison, Truman Capote, Johnny Carson, even Aristotle Onassis drop into and out of the story, adding texture to this weird little fable about fame and foibles.

But, it all comes back to Susann and Mansfield, Midler and Lane, so much that I want to rename the film, Aren’t They Great. Look, ma, no question mark! The title isn’t really a question, at least, not as Lane reads it. Instead, it is an affirmation of his love and admiration for her, of her strength and toughness, "a truck driver in drag," as Capote dismissed her. They are the original poster kids for making daiquiris when life gives you... whatever you can make daiquiris with, even if you end up with a lox daiquiri.

Although a biopic like so many of the films mentioned at this year’s Golden Globe Awards ceremony, Isn’t She Great will not be mentioned at next year’s ceremony, I am sure. What was especially troubling for me this year was that, as many films as I have seen in the past year, there were so many named in various nominations that had not opened at a theater near me.

I originally applauded the distinction the Hollywood Foreign Press Association makes in presenting Golden Globe Awards to dramas and to comedies as distinct categories. Jim Carrey, who won for best performance for an actor in a comedy, however, pointed out (correctly, I believe) that Man on the Moon, in which he delivered the award-winning performance, was not a comedy. Let’s look for the Academy Awards, in a couple of weeks, to be as mainstream as they always are. Meanwhile, of the eleven awards for television, only one, for best performance by an actor in a comedy or musical went to a show on a broadcast network, to Michael J. Fox for Spin City, an award which was as likely for a disease as for a performance.

With equal parts of humility and pride, I have raved my way through a year (a little more) of movies, and despite Hollywood’s best or worst efforts, I end up loving movies more than ever. So, next week, it will be appropriate to present the first annual (we hope) Golden Peanut Awards. If you can stand the suspense, keep your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and your bubble gum off the megaplex floor.