Film - Philip Kerr looks for the key to a curious Hollywood roman a clef

Like Narcissus, or the BBC, there is nothing Hollywood likes to look at so much as itself. Not the actual films, you understand; nobody in Hollywood watches those unless they're invited to a premiere. No, by "Hollywood", I mean the people who work in the movies, who are enriched, indulged and finally portrayed (some of them) in proportion to their celebrity.

Even when affecting to be self-critical, as in The Bad and the Beautiful and The Last Tycoon, or in a self-proclaimed satire such as The Player, Hollywood's portrayal of itself - with the notable exception of Swimming with Sharks - rarely amounts to anything other than the most cloying amour propre.

Written by Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan, America's Sweethearts is no exception to this time-honoured observance; scratch the fake vanity of the film's Cellophane characters, and you'll find some real vanity underneath. One also laments that an opportunity has been missed to create a satire about Hollywood and the lickspittle cult of celebrity, something with real bite.

Crystal plays a veteran press agent and movie publicist, Lee Phillips, who is cajoled by the studio boss Dave Kingman (Stanley Tucci) into hosting a press junket to promote an $80m film directed by a reclusive auteur, Hal Weidmann (Christopher Walken) - a film that Weidmann refuses to let Kingman see before he releases it. Things are made even more difficult because the film's two young stars, Gwen Harrison (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Eddie Thomas (John Cusack), formerly married to each other, and to whom the supposedly ironic title of the movie relates, are getting a divorce and can't bear to be in the same suite as each other. Crystal's bright, Capra-esque idea is to create the illusion among the press of a rapprochement between the two stars, thus obfuscating the film's possible short- comings. In this endeavour, the kibitzing Crystal is assisted by Gwen's long-suffering sister, factotum and candidate slimmer of the year, Kiki (Julia Roberts).

Watching America's Sweethearts is like watching one of Crystal's compere gigs at the Academy Awards ceremony, which is to say that Crystal makes sure to give himself all the best lines, and is only slightly more obviously pejorative of Hollywood and its dwarf stars than Sally Field's famous Oscar acceptance speech: "You love me. You really love me." True, many of Crystal's wisecracks are very funny; and yet, rather like Oscar night itself, the whole gaudy, self-regarding spectacle leaves one feeling strangely nauseated, as if you had been force-fed with a puree of Shirley Temple.

Fans of Crystal will enjoy his many wry one-liners; those who continue to admire Julia Roberts's tried and tested acting style - the buttoned lip, the defensive arm-folding, the sideways glance, the nose-touching giggle, the ingenue's blush (oddly, the older and richer she becomes, Roberts seems to grow in ingenuite) and that Joe E Brown-sized, money-shot smile - will once again delight in finding her transformed from ugly duckling to swan princess, as she sheds 40lb of implausible-looking fat-suit. Admirers of John Cusack will find little to enjoy here, however, least of all the discovery that the boy wonder is now almost certainly dying his hair. But I recommend that even Cusack's more discriminating fans - among whom I count myself - should check out this movie, if only for its curiosity value. Let me explain.

I am not referring to the curiosity value of seeing a film directed by Joe Roth who, for a number of years, was himself the studio boss at Fox and then Disney; nor am I referring to the curiosity that is to be found in this story (about an unscrupulous press agent) being distributed by Columbia Pictures, which was recently caught in the well-reported act of inventing not just a journalist's quotes about three films, but a whole journalist - which sounds like the high concept of another Billy Crystal movie.

No, the curiosity value to which I refer relates to one simple fact: that while you are watching this film, you will hear, perhaps, a bat-squeak of a suggestion that what we have here is that rarest bat of all, the Hollywood roman a clef.

Take the character of Weidmann, the notoriously secretive, bearded recluse who works in a shed in the grounds of his mansion, who keeps the only print of the film with him at all times, and who is frequently accompanied by his overprotective daughter. Ring any bells? Some American critics have suggested that Hal Weidmann is based on the late Hal Ashby (Shampoo, Coming Home). However, I think this suggestion is disingenuous, as there is a much more obvious candidate, and nearer to home, in the person of the late Stanley Kubrick.

As Loyd Grossman might say, let's look at the evidence. Hal was the name of the homicidal com-puter in 2001; Kubrick used to work in a stable in the grounds of his Hertfordshire mansion; the arguably rhetorical title of Weidmann's keenly anticipated movie, Time Over Time, is possibly a reference to how the shooting of Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, went way over time; Weidmann ("Wide man"?) even manages to dress a little like Kubrick, favouring workman's dungarees.

All of which begs the question: if that's Kubrick, then who might be these two divorcing megastars - one a spoilt bitch whose career is on the skids and the other a neurotic health-food addict, reliant on a weird religious cult, who tries to ride his motorcycle through a restaurant window, Mission: Impossible-style? And who is Gwen's preposterous new Mexican movie-actor boyfriend, Hector?

For a moment, I thought I might have found the skeleton key. But watching the credits at the end of the film, and reading the legal disclaimer, I realised I was obviously wrong. The characters and incidents portrayed and the names in the film are fictitious, and any similarity to the name, character or history of any person is entirely coincidental and unintentional. So that's that, then.

Oh yes, and Billy Crystal is six feet tall.

America's Sweethearts (12) is released nationwide on 19 October

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