O nce upon a time, James L. B…
Once upon a every so often old-fashioned, James L. Brooks’s “I’ll Do Anything” was a $40 million musical. It drew buzzards instead of buzz at a disastrous preview, went out of sight the wound and has emerged as a petite, sluggish, saccharine satire of Hollywood cum sympathy-tuggin’ look at fatherhood: “Kramer vs. Kramer” does lunch with “The Player” at Spago.
Nick Nolte and Albert Brooks no longer break into song, they just grapple with and crab about their own and their colleagues’ self-absorption. Nolte, who’s as pasty as a boiled potato and just about as compelling, plays a struggling actor who is committed to his craft. Now in his mid-forties or thereabouts, he’s still waiting for that starmaking break when his shrill ex-wife (Tracey Ullman) sticks him with their 6-year-old hellion (Whittni Wright) and her trunks of clothes.
Nolte, who has not seen the girl in three years, doesn’t know the first thing about child-rearing and, furthermore, is so preoccupied with his art that he doesn’t have time for the tantrum-prone princess — much less space in his two-room flat.
To complicate matters, he begins a new job as a chauffeur to a growling B-movie mogul (Brooks, sounding vaguely like a dyspeptic volcano) the morning after the child arrives. To complicate the complication, Brooks becomes romantically linked to a plain-spoken movie pollster (Julie Kavner) whose propensity for truth-telling is a side effect of mixing Prozac and Xanax.
Meanwhile, Nolte becomes involved with a callow junior member of Brooks’s Popcorn Pictures team (Joely Richardson) who thinks she is more sensitive than her self-important colleagues. But she’s not. Richardson is tired of the action pictures Popcorn usually turns out and dreams of doing a remake of “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” with Nolte in the lead. Though she has no apparent motivation for doing so, she turns on Nolte when his screen test fails to impress others at Popcorn. It’s decided that he’s not sexy enough to play the part.
(Mr. Deeds as sexpot? Oh, never mind.)
There are some decent lines, such as Kavner’s to Brooks: “I’m here {with you} for the same reason that 86 percent of older women love ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ I’m trying to believe that underneath {all that bull} is a sweet, caring guy.”
“Beauty and the Beast” — now there was a musical. “Tale as old as time … dah de dah dah dah.” Kind of makes you feel like singing.
“I’ll Do Anything” is rated PG-13 for sexual situations.