Albert Brooks's sixth directing effort is his first outright disappointment. It doesn't start out that way. The protagonist -- Brooks himself, of course, this time in the part of a mainstream screenwriter -- is close enough to Brooks in reality, a middle-aged Hollywood marginal who has "lost his edge" and is "past his prime," to lend tremendous conviction to his enervated, wan, whiny delivery. And in the freewheeling early stretches, before the movie fixes its focus, he takes us on a darting, slashing, broken-field ramble through the hierarchy of Hollywood today. The trouble comes with the introduction of the central premise: the introduction of Brooks, to be exact, to a purportedly immortal Muse, daughter of Zeus, in the form of Sharon Stone, who turns out to be a "demanding mistress" in the mundane sense of requiring a sacrificial trinket from Tiffany's, a suite at the Four Seasons, and a Waldorf salad after room-service hours. We cannot really tell if the screenwriter's subsequent "inspiration" -- a custom-fitted Jim Carrey vehicle set at an aquatic theme park -- is supposed to be genuinely good or merely commercially good. (From what we hear of it, it doesn't sound like either.) We can't even tell what sort of writer the hero is supposed to be: his rejected script at the outset was a high-testosterone actioner. (The word "hack" comes to mind, but there is no flow of humor to support it. Brooks, in a departure from his earlier self, now seems disinclined to cut off his character from sympathy.) Nor are we given any reason to believe for an instant that the Muse is who or what she claims to be: the eventual revelation is surprising only in its utter conventionality. And the role of the writer's wife (Andie MacDowell) dampens even the metaphorical possibilities: the hero shows no sexual interest in the Muse, so it's not as if he is "inspired" to impress her; and the wife, after a moment of misgiving, bonds with the Muse not just as a buddy, but as a creative collaborator in her own cookie-baking career, so it's not as if she need feel any jealousy over her husband's dalliance with his "art." Where previous Brooks movies had strong central ideas to sustain them through any thin patches of laughs (the idea in Mother may only have been a casting idea -- an older actress we hadn't seen on screen in a while -- but it was nevertheless a fertile one), it's the central idea that's weak in The Muse. It's the central idea that stops the laughs. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd