A reunion of the star and the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Hugh Grant and Richard Curtis respectively, both very skillful in their differently frothy and frilly ways. But now Julia Roberts crashes the party, in a self-referential role ("It's taken two rather painful operations to get me to look like this") as Hollywood's Biggest Star By Far, who deigns to take an interest in a humble bookshop proprietor while on a promotional tour in London. The script is burdened, as that of Four Weddings was not, by the requirement of equal time, or at least a fair share of the time, for the female lead. And even though she is shortchanged on verbal pearls, she has vast stretches of simply being, or looking, sweet, sincere, vulnerable, needy, wary, wounded, wistful, in addition to beautiful, and of being, or looking, not very good at it. Despite the blizzard of flattery blowing her way (Grant, that deftest of line-readers, is called upon to pay undue tribute to her ability to "deliver a line"), there are continual indications that the movie means to reveal the normal human being, the "girl," behind the movie star. But Roberts, vain, self-protective, pampered as ever, reveals only the movie star behind the movie star. Director Roger Michell, moving up in economic bracket and down in cultural bracket from his Jane Austen adaptation (the BBC Persuasion), tries to stay in touch with the art house by interrupting his misty-eyed adoration of the stars for some Mike Leigh-type mockery of selected satellites, leaving out, however, the crucial Leigh ingredient of playing no favorites. It does not, in particular, help Roberts to be accepted as an ordinary person when the ordinary people are treated as poor unfortunates. The director, just to say something nice about him, oversees one graceful tracking shot of a stroll down a city block and through three changes of season. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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