MOVIE REVIEW : Writer-Director Fails to See or Sell ‘The Big Picture’

“The Big Picture” (selected theaters) is an attempted satire on the banalities and venalities of Hollywood that turns into a kind of celebrity roast. Somehow, the jokesters and their target get promiscuously intertwined.

This is supposedly a movie about idealistic film makers trapped in the Hollywood system. Yet it looks like a standard ‘80s sell-out comedy, full of lame dialogue, guest stars and shticky gags, with a young hero seduced away from his steadfast girlfriend by the daffy, goofy, corrupt Establishment--and then finding himself, and integrity, in time for the rock song under the closing credits.

This attack on compromise--in which Nick Chapman (Kevin Bacon), a student-film prize winner, is wooed and dumped by the dream factory--looks like all the other rib-digging sex-and-success comedies: the end result of the same marketing-research, cookie-cutter methods it’s trying to spoof. It’s as if a film maker wanted to make a satire about a young genius trying to make another “Persona” inside the Hollywood system, and being forced to turn it into “Beach Blanket Bingo”--and then somebody decided to play it safe by sticking in sex and beaches and shooting it in the style of “National Lampoon’s Vacation.”

Writer-director Christopher Guest blows his wad early. He and his hip cinematographer, Jeff Jur (“Dirty Dancing”), stage a student film awards banquet with four amusing parodies of typical student films. This scene, emceed by Eddie Albert, is clever but no gem. And, if it weren’t for later appearances by Martin Short (unbilled) as an effete agent and J. T. Walsh and Don Franklin as a bland exec and his crafty secretary, it would be the best the movie has to offer.

“The Big Picture” has the same flaws as most student films. It’s underwritten and overdirected. The laborious, one-note gags include old movie parodies of Bogart, “Psycho” and “The Lost Weekend,” opulent parties with starlets who ditch you when you’re down, funny fat snobs, rock videos and swishy agents. Guest, who has wonderful delayed comic timing when he acts, delays the timing too much here: The whole picture seems sapped.

Scriptwriters Guest and Michael McKean (“This Is Spinal Tap”) and Michael Varhol (“Pee-wee’s Big Adventure”) have amusing credits; McKean also doubles as a lovable buddy cinematographer. But their dialogue here has the monomaniacally spare quality of the average ‘80s studio screenplay, as if the speeches were being held under seven to 10 words apiece to keep readers from eye-strain. The few observant bits of Hollywood jargon (“Call my secretary and I’ll call you back”) rattle around like manufactured bon mots in a sea of tinseled blather.

Guest’s heart is in the right place. But “The Big Picture” (MPAA-rated PG-13) is closer to a jiggle movie than to a truly trenchant Hollywood satire like Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels” or Ben Hecht’s “Woman of Sin.” And, as for the brilliant personal drama that Chapman wants to shoot: It looks pretty terrible, too--as if Nick were trying to remake “The Passion of Anna” on a set built for a Frosty the Snowman commercial. If you’re going to mock commercialism and stand up for art, you’d better make sure you know the difference between them.