'Town and Country' is low on comedy

Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and a polar bear walk into a bar ...
   It sounds like a bad joke, but the new film "Town and Country" spells it out plainly: Men are biologically driven philanderers. Even the best of us can't stand the temptation of a short skirt, and we have the willpower of a golden retriever left alone beneath the dinner table.
   It's been said before, and it's been said better, too. "Town and Country" starts and ends as unevenly as instant mashed potatoes, but there's a highly comedic hour in the middle that makes the mucky intro and outro tolerable.
   Screenwriter Michael Laughlin wrote a patchy script that makes it difficult to get past the first 30 minutes. Porter (Warren Beatty) is a well-known New York architect with a fabulously successful life. As he counsels his friend, Griffin (Garry Shandling), who recently cheated on his wife Mona (Goldie Hawn), Porter finds his own libido wandering for the first time after 25 years of faithful marriage to Ellie (Diane Keaton).
   After a few affairs (including one with Mona, Griffin's ex-wife and Ellie's friend), Porter is caught and retreats to Sun City with the also-dumped Griffin. He wanted to get away from the grind, and in the process he meets a few other women. But ultimately he decides to return to New York to attempt to salvage his broken marriage.
   Credit goes to Laughlin for not neatly tying the story up in a satin Hollywood bow at the end, but that's all the credit he deserves. The film (classified as a comedy) rarely evokes laughter. Initially upon seeing the male characters head to Sun Valley I thought it bad, but surprisingly that's where the movie finds itself.
   It's supposed to be funny, and thanks to shining performances from Andie MacDowell, Charlton Heston, Jenna Elfman and Marian Seldes, part of the film takes the road to high comedy.
   MacDowell plays one of Porter's Sun City flings who is perversely stuck in doll-personifying childhood. Her parents (Heston and Seldes) are queerly matched; she's an uncanny Mommy Dearest-type road raging in a wheelchair, and he's a - go figure - gun-loving overprotective father.
   Elfman plays Auburn, the owner or a bait and tackle shop who befriends the born again bachelors; together they attend a Halloween costume party with Auburn as Marilyn, Griffin as Elvis and Porter as a polar bear.
   Cheap joke or not, that scene alone is worth the price of admission.
  

---

  © 2000 Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved.