Midler, Lane far from 'Great' By Erin Podolsky Daily Arts Writer Bette Midler has always been something of a showboat. That sort of thing happens when you've been on stage for decades, and it's hard to drop the act when you do a movie. In a lot of instances, the diva act works ("Big Business," "The First Wives Club"). But because of the persona Midler has created, there's also a feeling that she brings with her that she's playing the same role again and again - or worse, merely playing herself. In "Isn't She Great," Midler is once again doing her old thing, although this time she's a diva without a shtick for much of the movie. As novelist (if such a term can be used for someone who took the excesses she saw in showbiz and then gave them pseudonyms on the page) Jacqueline Susann, Midler caws and screeches her way through 90 minutes of sheer horror as the ill-fated opportunist. That's right, opportunist - whether we're supposed to sympathize with the hand Susann is dealt during the 20-odd year timeframe of the movie (dead-end career, the pain of being married to Nathan Lane, an autistic son, breast cancer) is irrelevant. Sympathizing with a brassy woman who wants to be happy is one thing; sympathizing with a brassy woman who unwaveringly believes that the only way to be happy is to be famous is quite another. Susann - or Midler, or whoever - instead evokes not much other than pity and cringing. "Isn't She Great" is very clearly meant to be light-hearted, given that nobody would ever enjoy a movie in which the protagonist who happens to be dying like, say, Andy Kaufman, could be funny. But it comes off instead as crass and insulting. It's nice to see Susann crank out her sex, drugs, rock'n'roll pulp novel "Valley of the Dolls" and finally find a publisher. But she and Lane are so grating, so irritating, so unearthly in their attitudes and actions, that the moment passes very quickly. David Hyde Pierce plays Susann's Wonderbread, so-in-the-closet-he's-paying-rent editor Michael Hastings. He is disgusted by the raunchy excesses he sees in both Susann's novel and Susann herself and sets about righting all of the pornographic wrongs in her so-called literature. Naturally, he grows to love her as we're supposed to do. But he's in a movie, and we're in reality, and "supposed to" becomes null and void long before the fourth time Midler squeezes herself into a hideous lycra outfit that bulges in all the wrong places. If she's doing it in the name of character, fine - but how can we ever like her like this? It's an impossible task. There's disbelief, and then there's fright night. The latter is what happens when the former is stretched too thin. "Isn't She Great" stretches so much that Torquemada might as well be waiting in the wings. Paul Rudnick's screenplay doesn't help much. The laughs fall flat for the most part save those few horrified snickers (and one genuine laugh courtesy of Hastings' grandmother and aunt) that come as a result of Susann's brazen presence. Granted, Susann rarely plays the "poor me" card, but perhaps that's because Rudnick, Midler and director Andrew Bergman suspected from the get-go that to do so would be the final nail in an already DOA flick's coffin. All three principles have no excuse for this comedic dirge; we've seen Midler be hysterically funny in the past, Rudnick wrote "In & Out" and Bergman wrote and directed two great early 90s comedies, "The Freshman" and "Honeymoon in Vegas." Susann's riches-to-riches story about her insatiable, oft-repugnant quest for fame at the expense of others (her husband's self-esteem, her friends' closeness) wreaks the same havoc on "Isn't She Great," failing to pay much attention to things external to the main thrust of Susann's quest. At one point Irving, her husband, leaves her. We have some idea why, but Susann never seems to figure it out. Could a woman who observed everything she saw behind the stage and screen really be so oblivious to her own love life? I doubt it. There's the sneaking suspicion about this recreation of Susann's life that maybe she's been bleached and bulldozed by what a writer, director and star thought the public wanted to see, leaving out the real story - the story that Susann might have told had she been afforded the chance. Making her so fame-hungry does her a great disservice. Rudnick believes the best way to end a scene is to have Lane blurt out, "Isn't she great?" Nobody ever responds to the question, so I guess it's meant to be rhetorical. Maybe this would have been a better movie if somebody had had the cojones to step up and just say no. Courtesy of Universal Pictures Isn't Nathan Lane's eyebrows great in the latest Bette Midler travesty "Isn't She Great." Originally on page 5A in the 1-31-2000 issue of the Daily.