Posted: 09/01/1999

The Muse

(1999)

by Michael Koenig

Why does The Muse fail to amuse?

THE MUSE, the latest film from Albert Brooks, is a tepid Hollywood satire that lacks the biting wit that has characterized Brooks’s previous films.

Often Brooks’s films seem to be a collection of parts that don’t fit together. In THE MUSE, the beginning of the film seems to promise an acerbic insider’s take on Hollywood. The film opens with Brooks’s character, screenwriter Steven Phillips, receiving a Humanitarian award. When they get home, he tells his daughter that a humanitarian award is a consolation prize for someone who hasn’t won an Oscar.

Soon Brooks is meeting with a much-younger executive at Paramount. Over lunch, the executive pans Brooks’s latest script and says that he is cancelling Brooks’s three-picture contract. The executive tells him he’s lost his “edge.”

Brooks’s wife Laura (Andie MacDowell) advises him to call his friend, Jack Warrick (Jeff Bridges), a much more successful screenwriter. After some hesitation, Jack tells Steven that he has been using the services of professional Muse Sarah Little (Sharon Stone), one of the daughters of Zeus. At first, Steven doesn’t tell his wife about the Muse, leading his wife to believe that he may be having an affair; however, that plot point is quickly dropped and Laura and Sarah become allies.

The film that the Muse is encouraging Steven to write is supposed to seem ridiculous: a summer comedy with Jim Carrey as an aquarium owner. But the idea really isn’t developed, or taken to absurd extremes: It’s just supposed to seem amusing in and of itself.

Part of the problem is that Brooks has toned down his character too much. In films like Modern Romance and Lost in America, he played a whiny, self-obsessed neurotic who was prone to outbursts. He took the risk of alienating his audience. In THE MUSE, he is often reduced to reaction shots, acting irritated in an ineffectual way. Brooks has only one or two of his classic rants in this film, and neither of them are particularly memorable. He has lost his “edge.”

Brooks even takes a few ill-advised forays into physical comedy, including a scene where he has to carry around a heavy lamp on his head and one scene where he ends up with a salad dumped all over himself.

Once Stone enters the film, the story loses its focus. Stone’s performance is all one-note, as she plays a spoiled character who flounces around making ever-more extravagant demands upon Steven, whether it be for Tiffany gift boxes or a $1,700 dollar-per-night suite at the Four Seasons.

Bridges has almost nothing funny to do, except for a scene in which he demonstrates extremely poor form at tennis. McDowell has little to do but be supportive of her exasperated husband.

Some of the celebrity cameos are amusing. The film features a wide variety of walk-ons, including Cybill Shepherd, James Cameron, Jennifer Tilly, Rob Reiner, celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, and Lorenzo Lamas (whose screenplay the young executive drools over, even as he’s giving Brooks the brush-off). The most amusing cameo is by Martin Scorsese, but he’s only in the film for a minute or two.

There are few big laughs in the film. Brooks does have a funny conversation with an Italian at a party, full of malaprops and misunderstandings, but the scene seems to be more of a set piece than an integrated part of the film.

There are few surprises. The film is very clumsily structured in the way that it drops hints about what’s going to happen next. For instance, when Laura tells Sarah that she’s always wanted to start a cookie business, we instantly know what’s going to happen for the next half-hour of the film. The gag in which Steven has to walk miles to Steven Spielberg’s office makes it pretty obvious that he isn’t going to get an audience with Spielberg.

The revelation of Stone’s real identity is pretty easy to guess. The scene in which her secret is revealed is a throw-away, introducing two characters who make a quick appearance for the convenience of the plot and then just as quickly disappear.

The main problem with THE MUSE is that, unlike in the recent Bowfinger, Brooks doesn’t seem to identify with Hollywood’s outsiders. Steven Phillips isn’t trying to make great art or even to achieve a far-fetched dream of stardom; he just wants is to keep riding on the Hollywood gravy train.

Michael Koenig is a writer, editor, and a graphic artist in Oakland, California, and is generally in need of a nap.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com