MOVIE REVIEW : STEREOTYPES SOUR ‘SWEET’ LIBERTY’

Alan Alda, of all people, must know how movies are made. So why does he wrap his strained and flabby comedy “Sweet Liberty” in such threadbare cliches? This behind-the-scenes look at a movie troupe invading a small college town certainly isn’t the affectionate look of a writer/actor/director toward his craft. It’s another warmed-over serving of the same weary and even offensive stereotypes that have defined “movie people” to an avid public since the days of “Hollywood Hotel.” (“Sweet Liberty” opens today at the Bruin and Cineplex Odeon Showcase, citywide on Friday.)

Alda plays a prize-winning North Carolina historian whose nonfiction account of the American Revolution, centering around the diaries of one Mary Slocomb, has been bought for the movies. However, his biggest problem as “Sweet Liberty” opens seems to be talking fellow academic Lise Hilboldt into living with him. Their arguments on the subject occur four times within the first half-hour.

Of course, as the movie company disembarks from its caravan of sleek buses, everything changes. (Michael Caine on a bus ; Michelle Pfeiffer on a bus ? Had their agents died?) Bearded screenwriter Bob Hoskins is another arrival, slatheringly grateful to be in the presence of such a talent as Alda’s, “after 20 years slaving in the schlock mines.” Alda’s first look at Hoskins’ script confirms everyone’s most cherished fears--that crass Hollywood has again besmirched a great book.

Baby-bully director played by Saul Rubinek knows his teen-age audience. His formula: Defy authority, destroy property and take off people’s clothes. For this, he has chosen a story set in the 1700s? Did his researchers never tell him one tiny fact about movies for teen-agers: that the present or the future are the only periods they have an interest in. Did no one check the grosses of “Revolution”?

Onward and downward from here. Before you know it, married ladykiller Caine is cutting a wide swath of charm through all the local women, the college president’s wife Lois Chiles and big-eyed Hilboldt included. Alda has fallen for Pfeiffer, his Mary Slocomb incarnate, not averse to a little location hanky-panky. And between Hoskins and Alda, the film is being reshaped, via new pages of dialogue turned out by Alda every night and slipped to the stars under the very nose of Rubinek.

Alda’s faith in the omnipotent author/screenwriter is as touching as it is jaw-dropping. What about the omnipotent producer? (Don’t seem to recall that the film had one.) The omnipotent director? The all-omnipotent budget? Naw, just crank out these great new scenes and fix up everything. Then there’s the ease with which a historian switches to the intricacies of screenwriting, but anyone can write a script, no?

Worked into this lunacy is a subplot involving Alda’s dotty mother, the radiant Lillian Gish, in a role so cruel and so utterly irrelevant to the story that you can only weep for her. (Where were the Grey Panthers when they were needed most?)

With the exception of the character of the no-nonsense black assistant director, almost nothing feels right about the on-set details. From the lighting, starting time looks to be about noon, not the wretched early-morning hours that are part of almost every production. The actors play a rough-and-tumble game of soccer in their costumes--where were the wardrobe dragons? And the less said about a major battle scene done in one take and one day (albeit with multiple cameras), the better. Onscreen, this sequence would have looked a lot like the closing moments of “Last Resort,” although the low-budgeter has more laughs, overall.

Caine and Pfeiffer still emerge unmauled from this consummate silliness--Caine in a touching moment of recollection of wartime Britain, braced by the bawdy song “Knees Up, Mother Brown”; Pfeiffer, who seemingly never puts a foot the wrong way, voraciously consuming details about her character. She also has the movie’s best line, when an astonished Alda says she seems to be two utterly different people. “If I could only be two people,” she says dryly, “I’d be out of business.”

But there is something beyond silliness--and unfunniness--to object to in “Sweet Liberty” (MPAA-rated: PG-13), a distasteful view of film makers, without honor and virtually without craft. Alda’s placing of himself on an enlightened plane, above these crass movie makers, may be entirely unconscious, but it’s a smugness that permeates the whole film. Has stardom completely ruined Hawkeye Pierce?

‘SWEET LIBERTY’ A Universal Pictures release of a Martin Bregman production. Producer Bregman. Writer, director Alan Alda. Executive producer Louis A. Stroller. Camera Frank Tidy. Production designer Ben Edwards. Costumes Jane Greenwood. Editor Michael Economou. Music Bruce Broughton. Art director Christopher Nowak. With Alan Alda, Michael Caine, Michelle Pfeiffer, Bob Hoskins, Lise Hilboldt, Lillian Gish, Saul Rubinek, Lois Chiles, Linda Thorson.

Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG-13 (parents are strongly cautioned to give special guidance for attendance of children under 13).