Isn't She Great

Jacqueline Susann deserved better than this soft-pedaled piece of schmaltz, which stars Bette Midler as the Valley of the Dolls author and Nathan Lane as her puppy-dog publicist of a husband. By better, I mean worse: a bio-pic that matched its subject in all her gaudy, greedy, grotesque glory. More hungry than talented, Susann bombed on stage until Mansfield persuaded her to write what she knew: steamy novels about has-been actresses, horny studs, tranquilizers, and booze. A poignant New Yorker reminiscence by her Dolls editor, Michael Korda, prompted the movie and contributed to the mini-revival that Susann enjoys today, 25 years after her early death from breast cancer.

Midler's efforts to unbutton her uptight editor (Frasier's David Hyde Pierce) and his starchy family provide the film's biggest laughs. But screenwriter Paul Rudnick and director Andrew Bergman want bathos with their biography. We watch a wisecracking Jackie undergoing radiation and listen in on her regular conversations with God. Squeezed into the Pucci pantsuits that the statuesque novelist favored during her talk-show rounds, a shrill and overbearing Midler never finds the character behind the caricature. The film can't decide whether to embrace or recoil at the way she takes her husband -- and everyone else -- for granted, ultimately saying, through Lane's voiceover, that the driven Jackie still deserved a big fat hug. Perhaps Todd Haynes could have sympathetically dissected such an unsympathetic celebrity. Isn't She Great isn't that movie.

-- Scott Heller