The Muse
With Brooks, Sharon Stone, Andie MacDowell, Jeff Bridges, Mark Feuerstein, Stacey Travis, and Steven Wright.
A stupid idea? It’s supposed to be. The Muse is about the stupidity of people making movies in Hollywood–nothing new there. It’s also about the stupidity that drives them, organizes their behavior, and rationalizes their decisions–which is slightly new but not by much. Brooks, as usual, plays a whiner, so a good many laughs are about his whining in response to Sarah’s demands, especially after he becomes jealous of the attention she’s paying his wife, who’s starting to benefit from her services as much as he is.
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The last time Brooks took on the movie industry–in his second feature, Modern Romance (1981), a work that won him the admiration and friendship of Kubrick–it was the nuts-and-bolts side of the business that interested him. As demented as the Brooks hero was in trying to end a long-term relationship, he was a consummate professional as a film editor working on a stupid SF movie. And part of what was so fascinating about Brooks’s writing was the subtle thematic counterpoint between the personal and the professional, as it showed that a man who couldn’t manage to edit his own life had no trouble editing someone else’s brain-dead movie.
Part of the strength of Brooks’s realism has always been that he never even approximates Allen’s or Denby’s class-bound blunders. Yet though he clearly understands the myopia of the wealthy people in The Muse, he refuses to look very far beyond their limitations–and almost seems ready to accept their world as a near facsimile of his own. For the most part, the people in this movie are too narrow to solicit as much interest as their counterparts in Brooks’s earlier pictures. The only exceptions are Stone and Bridges, both of whom get a few wonderful opportunities to exercise their inadequately recognized comic gifts. Bridges at least had the last Coen brothers movie, The Big Lebowski, to stretch out in, but I don’t remember Stone having a chance to be this funny since Basic Instinct. She’s as good a reason as any to go see The Muse, but don’t go expecting much more.
