Flak Magazine: Review of The Muse, 8-28-99

That particular phrasing for creative castration appears about a dozen times in The Muse, writer/director/star Brooks’ latest and least funny movie. Various vegetable-brained Hollywood types toss the barb at Steven Phillips (played by Brooks), a second-tier screenwriter whose failed first foray into action movies has made him obsolete. Desperate to regain that edge, his producer friend hooks him up with Sarah Little (Sharon Stone), who is, from all appearances, an honest-to-goodness, scion-of-Zeus muse. Steven wants her to help him craft that elusive "summer comedy" he’s always wanted to write and, though much milling about occurs first, she does.

No one will dispute that that’s the plot of The Muse – take out any of those elements and the story crashes and burns. But before long you realize that all of the Hollywood stuff is there acting either as an excuse for some low-caliber jokes about the movie biz or as mere (but elaborate) set-up for standard Brooks-style domestic comedy.

Brooks does domestic comedy very well – give him a nuclear family and he’ll produce a meltdown every time … except this one. In part, it may be Andie MacDowell — who hasn’t shown herself to be the indisputable right choice for any role she’s had since sex, lies and videotape — in the wife role that derails it. And it may be the lack of any real tension within the family itself (outside a limp development about Steven resisting the idea of his wife as the breadwinner). Whatever the cause, the domestic comedy seems ill-formed, which might even be OK if it could remain secondary to everything else going on. But everything else is not funny.

Brooks already "did" the entertainment establishment, twice – once in the savage Real Life and again when he cast himself as a film editor in the excellent Modern Romance. He’s also done writer’s block before, in Mother. And so, while the quality of his previous films affords him the benefit of every doubt, an educated guess would be that when he’s made to revisit those themes for The Muse, he runs out of jokes. Fast.

I counted one piece of physical comedy (Jeff Bridges playing tennis), one monologue (Brooks’ kitchen-staged rant to MacDowell) and one celebrity cameo (Martin Scorsese’s) that were really, truly funny. All the other comedy founders, particularly the physical comedy that Brooks requires of himself and the toothless industry jokes.

But there is one great exception from this mediocrity: Stone as the muse. Among the most charismatic performers on American screens today, she comports herself with all due mythological grandeur — part goddess, part pixie. Even the movie’s ill-conceived undercutting of Sarah’s mystical status doesn’t detract from Stone’s magic, giving her first really definitive role since Casino.

Of course, Brooks’ mediocrity beats many comedic filmmakers’ best efforts, and an argument could be made for a certain Andy-Kaufman-meta-comedy vibe at work here: An edge-free screenplay with no third act about a screenwriter who has lost his edge and can’t come up with a third act. A stroke of alleged comic genius — that is, Steven’s muse-inspired screenplay about a Jim Carrey-like misfit who inherits an aquarium – that’s odiously not funny. When it comes to taking your $8 out of your wallet, however, it’s the laughs that matter, and The Muse doesn’t provide.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)