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Verdict: "Talent isn't everything," as one character says; too bad that applies to this movie

Details: Starring Bette Midler, Nathan Lane and Stockard Channing. Rated R for language. 1 hour, 35 minutes.

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Review: "Isn't She Great" isn't. Or even moderately good. A comedy about the garish, glamorous life of self-promoting, best-selling author Jacqueline Susann, the movie suffers from a fatal problem: The filmmakers don't know what to make of their overblown subject.

Based on a New Yorker magazine article and scripted by Paul Rudnick (the usually reliable laugh-meister behind "Addams Family Values" and "In & Out"), "Great" isn't quite biography, but it's not exactly burlesque, either. It's a highlights-only look at Susann's life, with jokes trying to plug up the narrative holes and compensate for the movie's lack of view and wobbly tone. Rudnick and director Andrew Bergman ("Honeymoon in Vegas") can't decide whether Susann is great or a gargoyle, a heroine for the paperback-buying masses or a fabulous monster who rode bad taste to the penthouse.

Bette Midler plays Susann, but mainly she's playing Midler, trotting out her usual tics and tricks and adorable wiggles. Nathan Lane plays her publicity agent husband, Irving Mansfield. Though he narrates the movie, he remains as indecipherable a figure as Susann. User or used?

The movie's Irving offers Jackie unconditional love. He even puts up with her need to go to Central Park, stare up into her favorite tree and conduct one-on-one discussions with God, whom she seems to confuse with a talent agent. (The movie has several of these scenes, each one a little more painful.) Irving is the one who encourages her to write her epic of page-turning tawdriness, "Valley of the Dolls."

"Isn't She Great" finally picks up by pitting Susann against a WASPish, appalled book editor (David Hyde Pierce, doing his usual "Frasier" dithering). Their scenes at least pay off with some good laughs, as Susann's blunt exuberance collides with the gentile gentility of Pierce's Connecticut clan.

Before it dwindles into movie-of-the-week mawkishness as Susann battles breast cancer, "Great" gives Midler several moments to show off her lethal comic timing. Making a guest appearance on a cooking show, she tells its hostess, "Any woman who cooks is a fool." Midler also has a few choice things to say about "Ozzie and Harriet," chatting with her pal, the actress Flo (Stockard Channing, who boosts the movie tremendously every time she walks on-screen). The cast also includes John Cleese, underused as Susann's publisher.

Though it squanders a great story, you can see why everyone involved was fascinated by Susann. It's harder to see why they needed to make a puffball tribute to the writer, who reportedly could be vicious. In the movie, Jackie admits, "I need mass love." "Isn't She Great" tries to make that relentless hunger for fame something cute. It would have been more interesting if the film saw it for what it really was: a kind of pathology.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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