February 2, 2000
Web posted at: 2:41 p.m. EST (1941 GMT)

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- Paul Rudnick doesn't really write screenplays, he writes long strings of gags. Best known as the real person behind Libby Gelman-Waxner -- whose satirical "movie review" column is always the highlight of Premiere magazine's consistently too-forgiving Hollywood coverage -- Rudnick definitely has a way with a zinger.

Unfortunately, his scripts, including 1997's "In & Out," aren't constructed like scripts. They're constructed like his faux-bitchy essays. This approach might work if the jokes all hit dead-center. But there aren't many writers who can crank them out so successfully over the course of an entire film that character motivation and narrative tension can be completely ignored. Rudnick has fallen victim to his own lack of technique before, and it's happened again with the aimless new Better Midler comedy, "Isn't She Great."

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This one could have worked, and it's a shame that it doesn't. Directed by Andrew Bergman, "Isn't She Great" purports to be a biography of Jacqueline Susann, the late trash novelist whose tacky masterwork, "Valley of the Dolls," became the best-selling book of all time back in the 1960s.

But it's obvious from the first scene that this won't be a straightforward biography. Bergman and Rudnick see Susann's improbable rise to fame as a chance to skewer pop culture success stories and fluffy, candy-colored 1960s filmmaking. Hip maestro Burt Bacharach even supplies a tongue-in-cheek score full of sappy strings and laid-back trumpet solos. The movie looks and feels like an inane Rock Hudson/Doris Day time-filler. And it's just about as stimulating to sit through.

Rudnick and Bergman's key position is that Susann was a charlatan who profited to an enormous degree from the American public's lack of taste. Not many people would argue. Truman Capote, the patron saint of sarcasm, once posited that Susann's technique wasn't writing, it was typing.

Midler basically plays Midler wearing even gaudier dresses than expected. Never one to over-tax herself by digging beneath the surface of a character, Miss M shouts and waves her hands like she's doing another one of her brazen stage routines. If you can't get enough of her, "Isn't She Great" won't be enough by definition. Everyone else will manage the usual Midler-generated intermittent chuckle and spend the rest of the film marveling at the fabulously overstated "mod" costumes and sets.

Nathan Lane is Susann's devoted husband and publicist, Irving Mansfield. Jackie, a failed actress, craves fame as much as Irving craves Jackie. His firm belief that she can achieve mega-stardom, one way or another, takes up most of the early scenes. We see Jackie bombing during a bunch of dead-end acting jobs and TV appearances. The first 15 minutes of the movie are pretty gruesome, full of "witty" repartee on the order of, "They didn't can you. They just requested that you never come back." Har-har.

Given the glib banter and vibrant look, you start to feel like you're watching some long-forgotten, third-rate Neil Simon play. The jokes just go zip-zip-clunk, and every once in a while tears well up in the actors' eyes.

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Bergman isn't afraid to throw away an important subplot. Jackie and Irving's autistic son is born and shuffled off to a special home in the country before you even lay eyes on him.

Then Jackie is diagnosed with breast cancer. This second tragedy is a recurring theme throughout the rest of the story. Susann is afraid no one will want to buy a hot-and-sexy novel from a woman who has cancer. But the medical scenes seem wholly out of place in such a shiny setting. Everyone acts like Catskills comics for 45 minutes, then Midler gets radiation treatments. Since you don't buy her as a real person, you don't buy her cancer either. Her visit to the hospital just means that she won't be able to change into another outrageous outfit for a few minutes.

The supporting cast is enormously talented, so a few showbiz-related jabs actually land on the chin. David Hyde Pierce pulls a Niles Crane as Michael Hastings, Jackie's stuffed-shirt editor. Some of Pierce's reactions to his client's tawdry prose are priceless, but he's forced to fall slack-jawed so many times it eventually ceases to generate a response.

Stockard Channing is also quite amusing as Jackie's stylish, neurotic best friend. One bit, in which she describes getting fired from "Ozzie and Harriet" for giving the apple-cheeked family a Nazi salute, is hilarious.

Unfortunately, John Cleese, as the self-consciously groovy publisher of "Valley of the Dolls," has to say things like, "Up yours, Tolstoy." He doesn't even manage a silly walk.

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When all is said and done, people watch movies to find out what happens next. Rudnick isn't the first comedy writer to mistakenly assume that fluff doesn't need urgency, that the film will drive itself forward on sheer humorous gusto. Sure, tons of movies make a buck every year while doing little more than tap dancing for two straight hours.

But Rudnick is a genuinely talented writer, not to mention an honored one. It wouldn't hurt if he tried to earn that praise every time he sits down at the keyboard. He seems to feel that a laugh is a laugh and anything else is needless sweat. But in "Isn't She Great," many of the laughs aren't even laughs. He's lobbing in pitches rather than winding up and throwing legitimate screwballs.

"Isn't She Great" isn't much better or worse than your average middle-range sitcom. There are a lot of well-delivered F-words and talk of steamy sex. Like Alka-Seltzer, it dissolves into nothing while you're using it. But here, you have a tummy ache when you're done. Rated R. 90 minutes.