MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Soapdish’ a Field Day

It is the fondest dream of the star-struck everywhere to imagine that idolized actors and actresses are just like the characters they play. If it turned out that Steven Seagal lived for needlepoint or that Madonna was really a nun with a special dispensation from the Vatican to perform in lingerie, the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the faithful would no doubt be heard from Malibu to Mecca.

And so we come to the clever premise of “Soapdish” (countywide), a spirited and amusing comedy that posits the engaging notion that the stars of TV soap operas have lives as screwed up and crazy as the characters they play, if not more so. As one dazed on-screen bystander puts it: “Life not only imitated art, it topped it.”

Outdoing the doings on “The Sun Also Sets,” the soap in question, is no mean feat. This is a show where a neurosurgeon prepares to operate in a skintight red dress, where actors can be decapitated in pink Cadillacs at a moment’s notice, or are exiled into comas of indefinite duration despite the fact that, as the program’s oh-so-sensitive director notes, “Actors don’t like to play coma. They feel it limits their range.”

Presiding over this menagerie is America’s sweetheart, Celeste Talbert (Sally Field), eight-time winner of the highest award soapdom can bestow but, at 42, a woman who wonders if there’s more to life than standing behind bars and tearfully saying such lines as “I’m guilty--guilty of love in the first degree,” written though they are by best pal and head writer Rose Schwartz (Whoopi Goldberg).

But though anything can send Celeste over the edge--put her in a turban and she’s liable to cut her entire wardrobe to shreds--she is not a raging shrew but a solid (albeit overly emotional) citizen whose life just happens to be an unholy mess. Not every actress could manage this dizzying combination of almost normal and awfully neurotic, but for Field it could just turn out to be the role of a lifetime.

For despite her two Oscars, Field is an actress who has often not known what to do with the enormous amounts of energy and earnestness at her command. She is consequently prone to overdoing emotions, not always the best idea in serious drama. But it is just that trait, wielded with enviable aplomb and combined with a try-anything spunkiness and a surprising flair for farce, that makes her just the thing for “Soapdish.” After hankering for respect her entire career, it would be ironic if Field finally--and deservedly--gets it via an off-the-wall project like this.

Not that anything comes easily for poor Celeste.

First she has to contend with a duplicitous toad of a producer (Robert Downey Jr.) and his actress cohort, the supremely malicious Montana Moorehead (Cathy Moriarty of “Raging Bull”), both of whom want to knife her in the back or anywhere else that’s handy. Then there is Edmund Edwards, all-too-stolid head of daytime programming (a splendid cameo by director Garry Marshall), who is understandably concerned about ratings because “a lady cooking sausage almost beat us.” Finally, there is Celeste’s always-troublesome personal life, represented by old flame and practiced seducer Jeffrey Anderson (Kevin Kline), an actor dreaming of a one-man “Hamlet” Off Broadway but for now reduced to playing Willy Loman in a dinner theater for the seriously aged in Opa-Locka, Fla.

Director Michael Hoffman, who made the remarkable, offbeat but very different “Some Girls,” has kept “Soapdish” (rated PG-13) moving at the crackling pace this kind of material demands: Too much time to think about what’s happening is not time well spent at all. And he has the advantage of working with a very knowing, cheerfully bitchy script written by the unlikely combination of Robert Harling, the man behind “Steel Magnolias,” a soap opera in itself, and the brilliantly manic Andrew Bergman, whose cracked sensibility, last seen in “The Freshman,” is very much in evidence here.

Finally, though, a piece of work like “Soapdish” must be put across by the actors, and watching Kline, arguably the supreme farceur of his generation, meet his match in Field is very much of a treat. “Soapdish” may only be an inch deep, but my what an inch it is.

‘Soapdish’

Sally Field: Celeste Talbert

Kevin Kline: Jeffrey Anderson

Whoopi Goldberg: Rose Schwartz

Robert Downey Jr.: David Barnes

Cathy Moriarty: Montana Moorehead

Elisabeth Shue: Lori Craven

Teri Hatcher: Ariel Maloney

An Aaron Spelling/Alan Greisman production, released by Paramount Pictures. Director Michael Hoffman. Producers Aaron Spelling, Alan Greisman. Executive producer Herbert Ross. Screenplay Robert Harling and Andrew Bergman. Cinematographer Ueli Steiger. Editor Garth Craven. Costumes Nolan Miller. Music Alan Silvestri. Production design Eugenio Zanetti. Art director Jim Dultz. Set decorator Lee Poll. Sound Petur Hliddal. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13.