Bette Midler has done some godawful work lately. Her recently cancelled television show was so bad, you watched gaping in disbelief at the sheer awful spectacle of Bette parodying Bette. In an attempt to cash in on Absolutely Fabulous' bitchy glamour, to the point of including an Ab Fab regular in the show's cast, she swozzled gin, flitted her vacuumed thighs about the set in tacky designer clothes, and dished dirt for whole episodes at a time. It should have worked perfectly, but the results were eerily unfunny, like Lucille Ball's last couple of series.
Isn't She Great was also a flop, but it isn't anywhere near as bad as the horrendous reviews that it received suggest. To read these, you'd think it was the worst movie of 2000 (her TV show was certainly the worst of 2001). In fact, Bette was nominated for a Golden Razzie for worst female performance of the year.
The movie was panned, I think, because people came to it expecting to see a story about Jackie Susann. Instead they got Bette doing her schtick. Why she was cast in this role is a mystery because there is no physical resemblance between the two, Susann being a statuesque, dark-haired beauty with a thick New York accent. The reasoning that cast her in the role probably went something like: Jackie Susann = drag queen, Bette Midler drag queen, therefore Bette = Jackie.
Well, she's no Jackie, but she's not bad either playing herself. She gets off some of the best lines in the movie and times them perfectly. Who else could make, "We're having sex!" sound so funny? She and Nathan Lane are a great comic team. He ably plays straight man (hmm), setting up her best bits, and pitching lines to the fabulous Stockard Channing. Channing, in fact, would have made a perfect Jackie but alas, isn't big box office like Midler, or at least as big as Midler was before her recent string of flops.
Funny bits aside, another huge problem with this movie is the screenplay. Paul Rudnick, who wrote this, can be extremely funny, as his script for Addams Family Values demonstrates. It's not clear what he's trying to do in Isn't She Great. Is it a comedy, a deathbed tragedy (SPOILER - Susann died of breast cancer), or some sort of literary tribute to someone who wasn't much of a writer in the first place? The tone that pervades half of the film is worshipful, as if Jaqueline Susann were an important artist. She wrote trash and was in fact proud of it. This movie would have worked a lot better if it had been more irreverent towards its subject and as trashy as Susann herself.
7* out of 10* (5* for great comic performances, 2* for the clothes)