Too rich, too old and too boring

Town and Country

WOODY Allen might have made light work of it.

As it is, Town and Country, directed by Britain's Peter Chelsom, is heavy going. Why should this be? Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Garry Shandling, Andie MacDowell, Charlton Heston: a dream cast. So why doesn't it fly?

One reason is that all their characters are too rich, too selfish and too old. Instead of sympathising with their common plight, you quickly find yourself turned off by their excessive privilege. I started computing the after-tax incomes these Manhattanites would require to support their in-your-face lifestyle: Fifth Avenue coops, town limos, chartered planes, Long Island beach homes, a Sun Valley ski cabin, a patrician Mississippi mansion, and everywhere the air of aimless affluence of people who've got status without achievement and riches without satisfaction.

Beatty and Shandling are ageing cads who spend days and nights two- timing their wives like dogs on heat: Hawn and Keaton are pampered bitches who run to their lawyer to sue their mates like cats on hot tin roofs. Aiming to be a midlife crisis comedy, a screwball update for the frank Nineties, all Town and Country adds up to is self- centred crowing and post-coital moans from the men, self-righteous tantrums and pre-divorce demands from the women.

Beatty is an award-winning architect whose elevations are now achieved in bed, not on the drawing board, with a sleep-around cellist (Nastassja Kinski). Garry Shandling, his antiques-dealer pal, is a gay who pays for sex with transvestites, but only opens the closet door to retrieve his beloved sports coats before they figure in his wife's settlement claim.

When both guys get kicked out of their World of Interiors pads by their spouses, they go off to lick their wounds in Sun Valley. There, misfiring comedy turns into backfiring farce. Charlton Heston storms in as a gun-toting loony, all wattles and war-whoops, spouting Hemingway and drawing a bead on Beatty. He's insulted his nutty daughter (Andie MacDowell) by fleeing her bed when she wants him to share sex with her soft toys.

How a Marilyn Monroe look-alike (Jenna Elfman) and a polar-bear costume (Beatty inside) come to figure in this catastrophe is too preposterous. I won't even try to explain.

Everyone comes together in the ladies' loo at a New York Designers Awards do to sort out the marital mess, and mercifully put the film out of its agonies. Written by Michael Laughlin and Buck Henry (who plays a divorce lawyer, badly), it cost a reported $80 million and has been lying on the shelf for two years. Peter Chelsom's previous comedies, Hear My Song and Funny Bones, showed a quirky, offbeat temperament: not one cut out for a New York comedy that takes the Beautiful People at their own overvaluation.

Each scene is care-fully directed, but like pulling tissues from the box: use and throw away. Newspapers and magazines, being largely duplicating machines nowadays for publicists' handouts, continue to feature Warren Beatty as some ageless icon of the male libido, still in enviable working order.

Town and Country dispels that notion.

He looks a relic of the past and of better films. He looks old, heavy, haggard and done.

But then even Viagra wouldn't give his performance a lift in a film as flat as this.

Copyright 2001
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