There’s a scene in “Soapdish” where Kevin Kline, as Dr. Rod Randall, is reading a script he’s never read from a teleprompter for a live soap opera audience, somberly forces out the following words: “It seems that Angelique has a rare case… of brake fluid.”

It’s so hilarious you’ll bust the seams out of your pink and white polka dot taffeta dress — and then what would you wear to serve the poor, machete-wielding mobs in the Caribbean? (something you’ll actually see Sally Field do as part of said soap opera, the sweeping “The Sun Also Sets,” the self-mocking center of “Soapdish”).

Kline, playing Jeffrey Anderson, a.k.a. Dr. Randall, is a former soap star banished to performances of “Death of a Salesman” in death-panel dinner theater in Florida, then revived with a second chance at the most maudlin “The Sun Also Sets,” and at this point in the movie among a handful of characters starring in the show’s sweeps-week stunt where even the characters don’t know how the plot mashup of Jamaican weather, brain surgery, and hopeful Chaplinesque mute girls show up in soup lines.

They don’t even have “sweeps week” anymore. Some poor sap at “Time” had to write about it in 2009. It’s a month and ratings stunts have included that very thing — a live episode. “E.R.” did it, it’s ridiculous, and “Soapdish” had made it a joke years before anyway. In any case, it’s Kline’s character — and that of Cathy Moriarty, as actress Montana Moorehead, who plays “Nurse Nan” on the absurd (who am I kidding, actual soap opera producers would kill for this material) soap opera within a soap opera that makes up, well, if not the central plot, a central plot of this scattershot, somewhat dated roller coaster of a movie, where every other scene will have you giggling at its un-serious send-ups of show business, then alternately cursing the actors for being one-dimensional cogs in an Aaron Spelling fluff piece.

The curious thing is that the quite talented Sally Field is supposed to be the self-deprecating star of the show, as a fading soap actress already railing against her Gloria Swanson turbans, and dealing with her own soap operas off-screen as well as on (I haven’t even mentioned the rival/niece/daughter subplot). She’s actually very forgettable, though whether that’s because “Soapdish” provided so much fodder for such an easily mockable genre or for the changeless, screechy, insecure nature of her character is hard to say. One wishes one could spend more of the movie’s time on Cathy Moriarty, who, if you can’t picture her, imagine a blond bombshell of the 50s with the tough-jawed sultriness of a film noir femme fatale and the dark-eyed, evocative-motioned swordplay of the silent era’s most captivating stars. In “Soapdish,” Moriarty, who held her own as DeNiro’s wife from “Raging Bull,” is the character I found myself rallying behind. Field’s character is fading. Moriarty’s should be rising. She takes desperate and fierce measures with a quaking Robert Downey Jr., who is totally spellbound by the vicious sexual charms of a woman in a tight white nurse’s outfit with decolletage. By credit time, the movie’s wasted this interesting and unusual character by explaining hastily that she’s actually a man. Too bad. Not for Moriarty, or her character, but for the movie, because one only makes such a nail-bitten plot decision when one is knock-kneed by confusion.

This is an utterly silly movie that now, 20 years on, is enjoyable but seems quite like a live action rehash of an intelligent Tiny Toon Adventures sketch lambasting soap operas. Quite often, “Soapdish” is silly to distraction. Most of the characters play one note. But, at least in the spellbinding Cathy Moriarty’s case, it’s a note that’s

thoroughly enjoyable.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore.