Little Black Book
dir. Nick Hurran
Columbia Pictures

Little Black Book is an exuberant mess, which will probably be misread by the audience it's being marketed to as a screwball comedy. It just might be a deliberately subversive, candy-coated poison pill (in the spirit of Forrest Gump) for America to swallow like the proverbial Kool-Aid. Storywise, it seems like a horse drawn by a committee. Hip, cynical and saccharine, it is very nearly rescued by its three leading actresses — Brittany Murphy, Holly Hunter and Julianne Nicholson — who turn it into an intergenerational babe-fest, so wonderfully watchable as to be worth at least matinee admission.

The trailers exploit Murphy, whose kewpie-doll eyes and recent outing with Ashton Kutcher (in the forgettable Just Married) threaten to make her the Goldie Hawn of her era. The bankers want to package her as the party girl she played in Clueless, but she's a lot more memorable when her zaniness dissolves into mania. Many first noticed her in Don't Say a Word where she was a straitjacketed psycho, the vault of a dark and valuable secret. A few lucky people were then blown away by her in the unseen Spun, a sort of Lost Weekend for the crystal meth set; there she played the sunnily tweaked-out plaything of speed-cooker Mickey Rourke. After that was 8 Mile, about which her tough little tramp was easily the best thing. But now someone has decided that she's part of the Amanda Bynes Squadron — an interchangeable part in the innumerable sexless "romances" being churned out for pubescent girls and their Republican mothers. (In Murphy's turn with Kutcher, the big joke is that they go on their honeymoon and yet never quite consummate the marriage.) You have to hope that Murphy has better sense than to take this path much further. She's got more in common with Reese Witherspoon and Kirsten Dunst, both of whom can cut back the saccharine with something much more bitterly intoxicating.

In Black Book, Murphy seems to be doing something nervy, inhabiting a character with clear and serious limitations. Her Stacy is a middlebrow cutie with a Wal-Mart dream: to be a broadcast "journalist" like her idol Diane Sawyer. She's a dimmer iteration of Witherspoon's Tracy Flick from Election, stuffed with hypercompensating ambition but without the brains or balls. And so, after dumping her college sweetheart on graduation day, she dives into the sewer of television and soon seems vindicated in her choice: She gets a plum job as an assistant producer and moves in with Derek, a dreamy New Yorker with whom she has zero heat — Stacy has a tendency to sing the execrable "Nobody Does It Better," but the "it" hasn't been so vague since "The Dick Van Dyke Show."

Stacy's new job is for "Kippie Kann Do," whose eponymous Kippie (Kathy Bates) is a female Jerry Springer, luring people onto her syndicated show with false pretexts, revving them up in the dressing room and pitting them against one another on stage. Stacy is befriended on the job by a senior assistant, the wise and battle-hardened Barbara (Holly Hunter). Hunter is inspired casting; it's almost as if we've caught up to her Broadcast News character post-disillusionment. Barbara's the most interesting character in the film — a hard-drinking sensualist with the heart of either an artist or a sociopath. In any case, she gets off on manipulating people into a drama of her own devising, then splitting.

While Kippie's staff brainstorms possibilities for their all-important sweeps-week live episode — Stacy amuses the room (and supposedly warms our hearts) by suggesting something on "inner-city schools" — someone suggests "Snooping Through Your Beau's Black Book." And so when Derek has to go out of town on business, Barbara exploits Stacy's insecurities (Derek has recently revealed he has a supermodel, Lulu, in his romantic past) and insists she pry into his conveniently forgotten PDA and dig up info on his former loves. Soon they're interviewing Lulu about her old boyfriends, especially Derek, followed by Stacy getting a pelvic exam from another of his old flames. Then Stacy tracks down chef Joyce (Nicholson), and dangles a spot on TV before her. Joyce is the most serious of Derek's exes and very clearly the pick of the litter here; Nicholson gives her just the right mix of vulnerability and toughness, and her everyday beauty (that galaxy of freckles!) seems entirely likely to inspire blissful devotion.

In sitcom fashion, Stacy very quickly has to stack lie upon lie and feels uneasy about it. She finds she likes Joyce, who still pines and hopes for a reunion with Derek. Soon Stacy begins to feel that she's done something maybe sorta actually wrong and, to nobody's surprise, gets her comeuppance when Barbara decides to exploit Stacy's situation for Kippie's benefit.

Between Stacy's first white lie and the climax's train-wreck of betrayal and recrimination, Little Black Book becomes a procedural oddity. It's frenetic and goofball at the beginning, then gradually gets serious without becoming poignant. This is partly because there's just too much going on in Kippie's sweeps-week circus; we don't linger long enough with any of the characters to feel their plight. Ultimately, we see that Stacy learns a vague something from her mistakes, but it's not clear at all how long she'll retain the day's lesson. After the big showdown, we get a couple of comic codas that feel like they were tacked on after test screenings to remind us we're supposed to like the heroine. Still, it's hard to care much about her romance with Derek or whether it works out (bonding in bed over Derek's dog's farts is about as carnal, or compelling, as these two get). We don't care much about Stacy's dream, either: Whether she ends up as Kippie or Diane Sawyer, she'll still be an unprincipled dimwit, propped up by the Barbaras of that world and convinced that what sells is what's important. We may never know why Brittany Murphy and the film's writers would want to foster such a message, but they do it very convincingly.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)