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Its first mistake: 'Alex & Emma' mimics poorly-made comedy
Kate Hudson and Luke Wilson in 'Alex & Emma'
Warner Bros.
Somehow (but how?), the audience knew not to go. It died from the first hour everywhere. Except for Hepburn's extravagant wardrobe, it was a stinker -- one of the great examples of cinematic miscalculation.
Holden played a writer who hired secretary Hepburn to take dictation for a terrible screenplay that kept changing form and genre. The two then appeared in silly scenes within scenes representing the screenwriter's many failed flights of fancy.
"Alex & Emma," a new movie written by Jeremy Leven and directed by Rob Reiner, purports to be based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's semi-autobiographical "The Gambler," wherein an author with gambling debts writes on a month-long deadline. Dostoevsky fell in love with his stenographer.
Beyond all reason, or much sense of how an audience responds to form, Leven and Reiner have turned "The Gambler" into "Paris When It Sizzles," with most of the latter's liabilities.
Alex Sheldon (Luke Wilson) has one novel on his resume, "Love Means Always Having to Say Your Sorry" -- a 34-year-old joke so lame it's hard to believe someone tried to make it new again).
Still, he has a lucrative deal with publisher Wirschafter (Rob Reiner) despite the absence of a single idea.
When two Cuban leg breakers turn up to wind his clock and give him 30 days to pay a $100,000 dog-races debt, Alex hires stenographer Emma Dinsmore (Kate Hudson) to take dictation on spec for the month. (Oh, yeah?)
She inspires him and influences the flow of a novel that he dictates at the speed of sound in fully shaped, final-edit prose.
The two, based in present-day Boston, then envision themselves as the central characters in his 1924 story, with hers changing nationalities, accents and wigs as the two keep re-thinking her role.
At no point in "Alex & Emma" does Alex exhibit even a hint of a gambler's compulsive behavior nor tension enough to stretch a rubber band.
There is no possibility of audience involvement in the story within a story, especially when it's so frequently interrupted by the framing device, no matter how clearly it foreshadows or mirrors the reality of Alex and Emma.
What the filmmakers have lost sight of is that such a premise has no way of paying off for the audience unless the novel being written -- or the movie being made -- has a strongly satirical quality like the hambone play being staged within the backstage farce "Enter Laughing."
Reiner knows this. He must know this. His dad, Carl Reiner, wrote the novel, co-wrote the screenplay and directed the film.
Still, Rob Reiner thought he could override the odds by making the 1924 scenes vaguely foolish and staging them with style and creamy good looks.
But his picture is all process and calculation, helped by appealing leads but defeated by a lack of conviction.
Sophie Marceau, David Paymer and Cloris Leachman, in a cameo, have little to play in the novel's sequences, although Leven's two-tiered screenplay, from a purely technical vantage, is literate.
Thin romantic comedies can't seem to miss these days, so "Alex & Emma" probably can't help selling a few tickets. But imagine if the lessons from "Paris When It Sizzles" had been absorbed.
