I'm not trying to be cute when I say that the trouble with Just Write begins with the opening credits, for that really is where the trouble begins. After having engaged us with its quirky portrayal of our protagonist, tour bus driver Harold McMurphy (Jeremy Piven), the film comes to a screeching halt for a tedious sequence of establishing shots while an oppressively cheerful song rages in the background. "Make no mistake," the musical sequence warns us, "you're in for a heartwarming love story."

The reason the film is so thoroughly aware of itself as a heartwarming love story is because it has all the necessary ingredients. We will be told by several characters in the course of the film that the plot of the movie must be good because it is a pastiche of the writerly frustration from Sunset Boulevard and of the success story of an ingenue that we know from All About Eve. The challenge of Just Write, in other words, is to remake two of Hollywood's more brooding films into a heartwarming story about the triumph of love.

Not surprisingly, it succeeds to the extent that the viewer dislikes brooding films. Just Write is not an obvious piece of hackwork because it constantly goes out of its way to remind us of the two films that it's ripping off; it's a piece of hackwork for more reasons than I will be able to cover in this review. The most glaring tip-off, however, is that it pads itself shamelessly with two unimaginative musical montage sequences in addition to the one that runs during the opening credits. When bus driver Harold takes starlet Amanda Clark (Sherilyn Fenn) to a carnival, we don't so much observe their date as see snapshots from it while the director subjects us to yet another oppressively cheerful pop song. Roughly half an hour later, when Harold experiences writer's block (that strange kind of writer's block that pretty much confines itself to people who don't write), we have to listen to yet another pop song (this one a bit on the sombre side) as he struggles to force himself to rewrite someone else's screenplay. These montages wouldn't be so unbearable if director Andrew Gallerani had tried to give us something worth watching in any of them. But the montage that plays during the opening credits establishes that Harold is a bus driver by showing him driving a bus in a bunch of different places; the montage concerning his date with Amanda Clark at the carnival shows him clowning around with cotton candy; and the montage depicting his writer's block shows him ripping paper out of a typewriter and wadding it up.

Pretty insightful use of the all-powerful cinematic image there!

The fantasy of Just Write is that there are Hollywood starlets who are passionately devoted to acting, but who want nothing to do with the shallowness of Hollywood. Amanda Clark, whose last film grossed thirty million dollars, is aware that her boyfriend (named 'Rich,' get it?) has only attached himself to her because of the fame and fortune that she can bring him. When she meets the more down-to-earth Harold, she finds his integrity refreshing.

And he's refreshing in the way that only non-Hollywood people can be. He doesn't drink; he looks out for his father; and he makes an honest living by driving tourists around Hollywood and hurling witless barbs over his bus' PA system at movie stars. The only complication in his relationship with Amanda Clark is that she thinks he writes screenplays for a living.

Why would she think such a thing? Because that's what he tells her when he first meets her. For no reason whatsoever, screenwriter Stan Williamson has Harold struggle with his own integrity when Amanda first asks him about his job. "I go around telling stories," he says, which is true when you consider that that's what tour bus drivers do. But when Amanda says, "So you're a writer. Who's your agent?", Harold replies with a line that he just heard from another writer (or someone posing as a writer), "Arthur Blake at CCI." His first response wasn't technically a lie. It was a clever trick that Harold's use of language enabled Amanda to play on herself because of her own narrow expectations. But the second response is an out-and-out lie. What possible point was there in making him so clever with the first response if only to turn him into a complete poser with his second?

The point is that he, as the film will prove, wants more than anything to be a Hollywood poser. When Amanda's influence with the studios secures him a job rewriting the screenplay for the film she's about to star in, he goes to a bar and brags about knowing Hollywood heavy hitters and gets drunk with a couple of floozies who pretend to hang on his every word. He shows off by buying drinks for everyone in the bar and talking about his 'project.' We're supposed to think it's all very cute because he's only drinking in order to get over his writer's block. But even if he is drunk, he is having an awful lot of fun revelling in precisely the kind of shallowness that he knows to be offensive to Amanda--and that we had come to think would be offensive to him.

The strongest acting in the film occurs between Piven and Fenn (Harold and Amanda) as Piven chases her out of the bar in which she has found him playing footsie with the floozies while getting drunk on champagne. Piven does a pretty remarkable job of convincing us that Harold can't really believe Amanda is angry with him because he can't really believe that she saw him acting that way because in his world (the world of a tour bus driver), he has only ever behaved that way in his dreams. He has never had a chance to show off as a Hollywood success, and can't understand why she would hold his fantasies against him. But Fenn is justified in doing precisely that--in taking exception to what he wants, since he appears to want precisely the same things that she rejected playboy Rich Adams for wanting.

Piven's acting is uneven throughout the rest of the film (and atrocious in one teary scene), but Fenn brings out the absolute best in him as he pursues her through the bar and into a parking lot. Her own acting is consistent with her obscenely wholesome good looks--innocuous. But I have a soft spot for actors that instill confidence in other actors. I'm not willing to write her off on the basis of the ridiculous character that she was made to portray in this film--a thoughtful actress whose quest for a feminist aesthetic in her upcoming script results in the hiring of an outsider who delivers a script that prompts the supposedly thoughtful actress to squeal "It's just right!" and launch herself at him in an infantile embrace.

I'm less offended by the film's pop song padding and its ambivalence towards Harold's dishonesty than I am by one painfully contrived scene in which Harold encounters a writer outside of the CCI building. The writer searches the garbage cans in front of the building for recyclables while claiming that CCI chewed him up and spat him out. I don't mind when writers like Faulkner complain about the stupidity and excess of Hollywood, but I bristle when hacks like Williamson think that anyone will feel sorry for them when they get the fate they deserve. "I used to be a Hollywood writer," we can imagine the aging Williamson saying. "I took great films like All about Eve and rewrote them with happy endings. And then, when I ran out of ideas to steal, my agent stopped taking my calls."

Just Write is precisely the kind of hackneyed nonsense that has earned Hollywood writers their reputation. Because all of the complications in the film are fake, it is unsurprising when the tension between the main characters disappears at the end. The starlet embraces the tour bus driver while the people on the bus cheer. What a shame if the man responsible for allowing us such an insightful glimpse into the mysteries of the human heart should ever end up out of work as a writer!



Recommended: No