"Talent Isn't Everything" -- Stockard Channing as Florence Maybelle

Isn't She Great is a biopic that takes a look at a portion of the life of Jacqueline Susann. She wanted to be a dancer, but couldn't really dance. She wanted to be a singer, but she couldn't really sing. She wanted to be an actress, but she wasn't very good at that either. So she became a world-famous, best-selling author. The Guiness Book of World Records recognizes her Valley of the Dolls as the best-selling novel of all time.

I was excited about going to see this movie. I had seen the trailer only once and from it, and the excellent cast that director Andrew Bergman had assembled, I figured it couldn't miss. Bette Midler as the author, Nathan Lane as her husband, producer/agent Irving Mansfield, David Hyde Pierce as her editor, John Cleese as her publisher and Stockard Channing as her best friend. A very talented cast to say the least. Bergman isn't a bad director either, when you examine his credits, which include Honeymoon in Vegas, It Could Happen to You and The Freshman.

But in spite of the excellent cast and the fact that Susann's life was pretty fascinating, this movie sinks into a quagmire almost from the start and never really picks up speed after that point. Bette Midler, who is a larger than life, occasionally bawdy woman in her own right, seems on the surface an excellent choice to play Susann. Midler, who is everything that Susann wasn't, a talented singer and actress, gives the part her all, but the portrayal doesn't work. The author who put the T and A into tawdry novelwriting was equally loud and gaudy in her own life and it seems that even with their best efforts, the writers and costumers come up short in this area.

Nathan Lane is no better as her husband, who seems almost a parody of what one would expect a publicist/agent of that era to be. He isn't just a schmoozer, he's something more that my Yiddish vocabulary isn't quite able to describe. Even if the real Mansfield was like this, it would have been better to use some of the artistic license that was used with the real story here, to bring Lane's portrayal back below it's final over-the-top location.

There are moments in Isn't She Great where I thought they might be breaking through and reaching out to the audience to become more involved and engaged in the lives of the characters. When we see Jacqueline and Irving visiting their autistic son, who was institutionalized at a very early age, we see real human frailty. But those moments don't last. There is also a wonderful scene when David Hyde Pierce's character accidentally discovers the fact that Jacqueline is not the picture of health she fools people into believing.

Don't even bother to rent this one. Wait for it to appear on free television. Somehow I have a feeling it won't take all that long for it to get there.