Bad movies come and go, often in a weekend. But few bad movies have been so long coming as "Town & Country," director Peter Chelsoms "new" romantic comedy with a high-powered cast — Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Gary Shandling, Jenna Elfman, Andie MacDowell, Nastassja Kinski and Charlton Heston. With a script about two couples (Beatty and Keaton, Hawn and Shandling), both married for decades, facing the husbands infidelity, the film began shooting in June 1998, stopped in November of that year and, after much script triage, reconvened last April to complete the shooting. As the budget ballooned from $55 million toward the low nine figures, the film missed a dozen or so planned release dates. And now that the movie is opening, its an orphan.
Ah, June 1998! One can get nostalgic simply by remembering how long ago that was. The last millennium still had a couple years to go. The Dow had just risen to 9,200 for the first time. "Cigar" was not yet a smutty punch line. The Yankees had won only one World Series since 1978. In movie theaters, "Titanic" was still playing; "Deep Impact" had come out but "Armageddon" hadnt. Among the "Town & Country" cast, Elfman had just finished her first season of "Dharma and Greg," and Shandling his last season of "The Larry Sanders Show;" Heston had served only a few months as first vice president of the N.R.A.; Hawn was not yet known as Kate Hudson's mom; and Beatty would have to wait almost another two years before receiving the Irving J. Thalberg Award.
"Town & Country," I feel safe in predicting, will win no Oscars. Not just because its an intermittently — and, as you shall learn, instructively! — bad movie; the theaters are filled each week with new excrescences. And not just because its sure to be panned (though early critical word is dire). But because even the films stars are avoiding it as if its pellagra. Theres no gala Hollywood premiere. You wont see Beatty or Hawn touting "T&C" on Leno, Letterman or the morning shows. But, to their chagrin, you will see be able to see them on the screen, and on video boxes forever. Thats the rub to celebrity: famous actors cant be anonymous in their own films. A director has it easy: he can take his name off a picture. Actors, poor things, are forever exposed. Theres no such thing as a movie marquee that reads, say, "Ishtar, starring Alan Smithee, Elaine Smythe and Alain Smithe."
You may have a recovered memory of "Ishtar," Beatty"s big-budget fiasco of 1986, as you watch "Town & Country." From its very first sound — chirpy tuba music, suggesting both a heavy hand and forced whimsy — the spectator is cued to slouch into light despair, or to indulge in a what-were-they-thinking? shake of the head. Then it is revealed that the shlumpfy Shandling is cheating on fit-and-50ish Goldie. Beatty is presented as a loving husband who cheats on Keaton because, well, guys cheat. The script has its characters globetrotting from Paris to Park Avenue to the Hamptons to Mississippi to Sun Valley, Idaho, and jumping (or galumphing) from one bed to another, but the films lethargy of spirit keeps things static. Theres nothing all-time-dreadful about "Town & Country," but it does give the viewer a feeling of dissipation to realize that talented people wasted a couple years of their time and 107 minutes of ours.
Did this movie ever have a shot? Considering that the average age of the four lead actors is 56, and that the average age of todays moviegoer is, I dont know, nine-and-a-half? (they get their older sibs to sneak them in to the PG-13 films), you may wonder who the intended audience was. "Older-appeal romantic comedies are faltering badly," box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian of Exhibitor Relations said in an Entertainment Weekly story (itself more than a year old now) about the delays in production. Withholding the movie so long means that the lead actors are even further removed from Hollywoods beloved demographic. It doesnt help that the only actor with any manic juice is the 76-year-old Heston, who plays MacDowell's gun-crazy dad. He blasts a hole in a Halloween costume with his rifle, blows up a ski cabin, then runs amok with a rifle in a posh awards banquet. (Hope he had fun making fun of himself.)
But "Town & Country" isnt three years old; in its attitudes and tempo, the film is more like 33 years old. You step into the plex with your ticket for "Bridget Joness Diary," take a wrong turn into a nearly deserted auditorium . . . and suddenly its 1968. Not the real 68 — with the Tet Offensive, the French general strike, the shootings of Martin Luther King. Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, the Soviet crushing of the Prague spring and the Chicago 7 convention — but Hollywood 68, which had little connection with American life, except to massage the tepid dreams of a middle-age audience. (Didnt the moguls know that was televisions job?) The studio system kept on grinding out bland programmers as if it were the golden 40s. Elvis Presley and Doris Day were still making two or three disposable films a year. Teen movies? Horror films? Hardly a one. The most reliable big-budget genre was musicals, for Petes sake; "Oliver" took the Oscar for the years best picture.
And the most reliable medium-budget genre was the lightly ribald sex comedy, often adapted from a Broadway hit. The recipe was simple: take Shakespeares mistaken-identity plots and Molires domestic satire; add sugar and lard; leer until ready. The result was a confection that, in the spirit of the times — or, rather, the spirit of a decade earlier, so far was Hollywood behind the societal curve — managed to be both smirking and sanctimonious. Infidelity was generally taboo for the married heroes and heroines of these comedies; they had to make do with the appearance of philandering, stop at the brink of fooling around.
Thus, in "How to Save a Marriage (And Ruin Your Life)," swinging bachelor Dean Martin mistakes Stella Stevens for his best friends mistress. In "The Secret Life of an American Wife," lecherous movie star Walter Matthau believes his agents wife (Anne Jackson) is a call girl. The mood was different, more pious, when the subject of a domestic comedy was family life. Then the husband and wife (Doris Day and Brian Keith in "With Six You Get Eggroll", Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball in "Yours Mine and Ours") were happy, coping and faithful — just like all real-life married couples at the time.