Walken plays: Hal Weidmann - demented director, arthouse maverick, fourth-wall-breaking Hollywood gonzo
Ahh, the early 2000s rom-com: the dictionary definition of problematic. It's hard to imagine this sordid farce being written by Billy Crystal, as there's nothing here even vaguely reminiscent of When Harry Met Sally's cleverly sweet pedigree (though we do get an "I'll have what he's having" nod. Classy, Billy). Instead, we traipse through a lampooning of tabloid celebrity culture and the PR spin doctors orchestrating it, which would sound promising if it wasn't so laboured and populated by a spectacular cast wasted playing dreary, offensive stereotypes whom it's never clear if we're supposed to find distastefully ludicrous or quirkily loveable (spoiler alert: we land on the former). Hollywood's most legendary on/offscreen couple (John Cusack and Catherine Zeta-Jones) have a cataclysmic divorce once she starts an affair with her obnoxiously lisping Spanish co-star (Hank Azaria), and he...um...tries to crash into them with a motorcycle. The preening studio head (Stanley Tucci) tasks Crystal's PR guru and Zeta-Jones' sister/personal assistant (Julia Roberts) with reconciling the two for the press junket premiere of their final picture together. Naturally, all kinds of predictable, star-crossed-lovers drama ensues, and we get the distinct displeasures of Cusack working tirelessly to be so adorable we'd forget his domestic violence, Alan Arkin playing an Indian(??!) self-help guru, Azaria lisping "poothy boy" and defending his penis, and Roberts trotting out one of the most loathsome pining stereotypes ever, right down to a despicable 'I used to be fat, now pass the butter' routine. There's a lot of potential here, and Crystal gets some good zingers in ("I'm a paranoid schizophrenic - I'm my own entourage"), but the film itself is so relentlessly distasteful it's hard to stomach the few enjoyable bits - mostly montages from Cusack/Zeta-Jones' enjoyably hammy Hollywood romance dreck. 'Sweet' this ain't.
Never before has a shot of Walken been such a necessary tonic, and it's even better in that he basically exists here to take the piss out of the formulaic garbage spooling out around him. As the batty, heinously pretentious director of the final Cusack/Zeta-Jones fling, Walken brings all the wild eyes we could want. But, rather than careening over the top with artsy foppishness, he tempers his crazy with an amiable confidence that simultaneously makes him more of a dick but also more lovably removed from reality. He's only in two scenes - holding his passion project for ransom from Tucci and introducing it at the junket, but he's electrifying and hilarious in both - just take his insistent vulnerability when asking Tucci if he enjoyed the footage he sent him (the film's credits font). The real payoff is the climax, when the premiere reveals Weidmann has jettisoned all his filmed footage ("simply put, the script was shit") in lieu of an incendiary reality show style behind the scenes documentary chronicling the fragmentation of Zeta-Jones and Cusack on set. Walken spends the rest of the movie beaming and cackling gleefully in the face of all criticism, drinking in his public mockery of the industry's worst cliches. And, as climax to a film like this, the sardonic closure Walken grants couldn't be more satisfying. Now that's sweet.
Wacky Walken dialogue: Walken's loopy enough here that even his most mundane dialogue sounds wacky, but I'm a fan of his pontificating about his beloved film: "I weep just thinking about it [...] This is real life. The juice. The stink. The glory."
DOES HE DANCE: He does! He does! For some reason, we see Weidmann practicing a tap routine with Zeta-Jones in some kind of Nazi jazz club sequence. What's the context? Is he choreographing? Who cares! Dancing!
Overall Walken-o-meter: 8/10 cowbells. For a character so customarily out-of-this-world, Walken's antics feel reassuringly normal, if only because he's here to poke fun at how awful the rom-com surrounding him is. Whether Crystal intended him to function as a reflexive, sardonic meta-commentary is doubtful, but Walken's clearly in on the joke, and laughing alongside him as he watches the world burn is a deeper level of satisfying than I knew was possible.
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