The Muse

Is it legal for an Albert Brooks movie to be this resoundingly awful? Defending Your Life and Mother were a bit soggily pseudo-Freudian, true, but at least the zingers never stopped comin'; here, Brooks plays a screenwriter who is told repeatedly that he's "lost his edge," and it feels as if everybody's talking about the script for the movie that they're acting in right that second. Part of the problem, I think, is that Brooks' comic persona is only effective when he's playing a destructive force of egocentric nature; in The Muse, he's essentially a victim, and so his exasperated kvetching and defensive wisecracks simply make him seem annoying--he doesn't seem to recognize, as he usually does, that his protagonist is fundamentally a self-absorbed jerk. A much bigger problem, however, is that the film just plain isn't funny. And I don't mean that it's, say, merely pleasantly amusing as opposed to bust-a-gut hysterical; I mean that Brooks deploys joke after joke after joke and not a single one combusts--I laughed once, smiled twice, and lost track of the number of disbelief-inspired head-shakes by the second half hour. Not recommended. (M. D'Angelo)