This movie sitcom, starring Garry Shandling, Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty, makes light of mid-life crises, but has just enough laughs to make it worth the investment. [R]
By: Kam Williams
When you decide to make a romantic comedy with Garry Shandling, Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty as leads, you’re off to a good start.
Drollster Shandling, creator, writer and star of the Emmy-winning Larry Sanders Show, is a master of understatement. Goldie Hawn, the bubbly bubblebrain who won an Academy Award for Cactus Flower, still has that infectiously goofy giggle, while Diane Keaton, who won her Oscar for Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, settles for a more cerebral brand of humor.
Diane Keaton (left) and Goldie Hawn star as wives jilted by their husbands in Town & Country. |
The multi-talented Warren Beatty has been nominated for 14 Academy Awards in four different categories, as an actor, director, writer and producer. Although his only win came for Reds, his comedy work in such movies as Heaven Can Wait, Shampoo and Bulworth has netted him numerous nominations.
In Town & Country, Beatty and Keaton appear as the happily married Porter and Ellie Stoddard, New York City socialites and world travelers. Hawn and Shandling are coupled as Mona and Griffin, the Stoddards’ equally sophisticated best friends. Our point of departure is the imminent disintegration of both of these seemingly solid, long-term relationships.
Porter, a hard-working, highly successful architect, takes an impulsive flight of fancy into the arms of Alex, played by Natassja Kinski, an alluring cellist young enough to be his daughter. Griffin, meanwhile, hides a much kinkier secret from his wife, who is blissfully unaware of his midday rendezvous with a transvestite.
The storyline revolves around Porter and the beauties he dates during his mid-life crisis, including Andie MacDowell and Jenna Elfman. Oscar-winner Charlton Heston and Tony Award-winner Marian Seldes are wasted in tacked-on throwaway roles as his eccentric parents.
Equally disposable are Josh Hartnett and Tricia Vessey, who play Porter and Ellie’s sexually insatiable children. They, too, are so tangential that they remain superfluous to the plot.
The film was written by legendary scriptwriter Buck Henry, responsible for such masterpieces as The Graduate, Heaven Can Wait, Catch 22 and TV’s Get Smart. Here, however, his script exhibits only flashes of that trademark brilliance. Perhaps we should blame director Peter Chelsom for the choppy production that panders to the lowest common denominator by resorting to ugly vulgarities when not relying on wit.
The jarring contrast of subtle and crude comic content gives the film a schizophrenic feel. Yet, the same movie has many sublime moments, such as when a garishly dressed man is asked, "Are you Elvis or Evel Knievel?" Just enough laughs to make it worth the investment.
Rated R. Contains profanity, brief nudity and innumerable sexual situations.