Town & Country

It seems that the people behind this drudge of movie took all their cues from Woody Allen's movies during the 1990s. What I mean is, "Town & Country" is about a bunch of rich New Yorkers cheating on each other. I'm sure that everyone involved in it must be embarrassed beyond redemption for having gotten involved in it (and I don't just mean because of its abysmal performance at the box office). The only good character is Charlton Heston, basically spoofing himself. And how could a great screenwriter like Buck Henry have written this? He should have known MUCH better, given that he wrote "The Graduate".

All in all, terrible. Fortunately, the cast members have all done good work since. At least I think that they all have.

This thing was beyond crap, and I don't use that word often. I had heard it was bad, so I rented it for dud night, and called my sister to come watch it, because we need to bounce our comments off each other. Well, she left halfway through, vowing to watch Lord of The Rings, to try to cleanse her brain. I'm going to use a toilet brush on mine.

I should have known it wasn't an ordinary bad movie in the first scene. There's Grampa, aka Warren Beatty, sitting in a bed, trying to cover his wrinkled shoulders with the sheet. Talk about stomach-turning. That's the plot in a nutshell, old Warren pretending it's 1966 when swingers like him hopped on the nearest woman as regularly as they hopped on a plane.

Seriously, there is no plot. Every washed-up actor or actress in Hollywood is invited to drop by to make an ass of him (or her) self, including Charleton Heston, who must have already been in the grip of his recently-announced Alzheimer's Disease. I know rents are high in Los Angeles, but how badly do these people need money? And did any of them even get any? This stinker can't have made a nickel.

I can't summarize this mess because there was no rhyme or reason anywhere. I can't describe the wild over-acting, except to call it amateur night. All I can do is recommend that nobody, and I mean nobody, watch this thing. Don't inadvertently let your dog or cat see it. It's so bad you can't even make fun of it. That's how bad it is.

I remembered seeing the advertisement for this movie at my local theater when it came out. But I was unaware of the nightmare it was to film it & release it; all I did know was that it was in & out of the theater faster than COOL AS ICE. I had no idea this movie even existed until I read James Robert Parish's book FIASCO, which has a chapter on the making of TOWN & COUNTRY...and which, rest assured, is more funny & believable than what shows up on the screen.

After searching relatively high & low to find this movie (it was released on DVD, but logically, stores do not exactly keep a copy on hand), I watched it knowing about its history & that chances are, I would likely want to throw things at the screen. I am glad to say I made it through the first viewing alive, but will start by saying that no, this movie is not a winner in the slightest. Yet is it an all-around creative bomb? Not so fast.

Starting to film without a complete script was the oldest mistake in the book & they made it. Yet while it may have been a patchwork effort without much rhyme or reason, some lines were funny & rather inspired (most of them coming from Garry Shandling, who almost walks away with the movie, such as it is). Maybe having mature, veteran actors mouth some of the more scatological dialogue (as if this was supposed to be a senior's version of American PIE) was not wise, but that is often funny to watch in itself. Diane Keaton's line near the end, "Is there any women in this room you haven't slept with?", could easily be what audiences have been wondering for years.

The only thing the script missed was continuity & structure, and all that showed on the screen, resulting in a film that looked & acted choppy, with many characters played by big names being reduced to glorified cameos, making you wonder if there is a lot left on the cutting room floor (but we cannot blame the editor for all that, seeing as how they did not have much to work with).

The producers should have been well aware that working with Warren Beatty, a famously noncommittal perfectionist, was not going to be clear sailing. Part of (if not all) the script problems can be laid at his door, since he kept insisting on changes to the dialogue, taking up time & (most obviously) money. And of course, Warren was in his early 60s when he made this movie, playing the same old Casanova he always did. Audiences, most especially the young people who make up a large part of who goes to the movies, are not going to buy that anymore, or are unwilling to try. The studio should have saw this in the beginning & realized the chances of a box office success were slim to none, and thus rein in the budget before it went haywire.

After reading Parish's book & seeing just how things went bad with TOWN & COUNTRY, I rather think a movie about the making of a movie like TOWN & COUNTRY would have been better (and with all the same actors). What went on behind the scenes was funny & screwball in itself, and most of all, it was not even scripted at all. There was potential for a movie like TOWN & COUNTRY, but if a script had been agreed on before the cameras started rolling, then the financial fallout would not have been so large. As it remains now, it is one of the biggest box-office duds in Hollywood history, and the chances of it ever turning a profit are almost nonexistent (just think about inflation).

Final thoughts: For what it was worth, the actors gave it their best shot with this movie, never once placing tongue firmly in cheek with their parts (though, by all accounts, that would have improved things). I am not sure if anyone of them knew they were making something special.

A good portion of the script was actually funny, but whenever it tried to get serious & make some kind of statement about infidelity & morality, it went downhill from there. Even the much-bandied-about ending is so artificial & predictable, you can see it coming from a mile away. More of a cop-out & a feeling of "Let's just finish this thing already!"

Most of the people involved in making this movie have survived professionally, but only time will tell how Warren Beatty fares (that is, if he makes another movie again). Hopefully, the TOWN & COUNTRY incident awoke him to the fact he needs to finally revise (or abandon altogether) his stock character if he ever wants to work regularly & be taken seriously again.

"Town and Country" is a critically panned but mildly amusing flick which tells of the marital misadventures of two of middle aged couples (Hawn/Sanders, Keaton/Beatty) who split up over reasons of fidelity. The flick is top heavy with talent on the audience side of the lens with no evidence of same in screenplay and direction. Fraught with meandering repartee, comedic situation which come off like bad improv, a jerky flow, lack of cohesion, no center of gravity, etc. "T&C" isn't as awful as it is an underachiever. Okay for hard up sofa spuds.

Porter Stoddard (Warren Beatty) is a successful New York architect married to Ellie (Diane Keaton) with whom he has two children. Unbeknownst to Ellie, Porter is having an affair with a cellist named Alex (Natassja Kisnki). When the Stoddard's longtime friends the Morris' consisting of Mona (Goldie Hawn) and Griffin (Garry Shandling) go through a turbulent divorce after Mona discovers Griffin's infidelity, Porter travels with Mona to Louisiana to help her assess a property she owns and the two end up sleeping together resulting in further complications.

Following British director, Peter Chelsom's initial success on smaller films that garnered critical praise like Hear My Song, Funny Bones, and The Mighty, Chelsom was hired to do Town & Country a modestly budget $40 million comedy with an all star cast for New Line Cinema penned by Michael Laughlin who while more known as a producer, did have some writing credits on films like Strange Invaders and Strange Behavior as well as the 1986 drama Mesmerized. Production was a nightmare from the start with Beatty clashing with director Chelsom, the script was still being re-written as filming was going on (not an uncommon practice in the industry). Beginning production in 1998, production went through 1999 due to Shandling and Keaton needing to leave to work on other films with filming not resuming for another year. In the interim Buck Henry had been paid $3 million to do some "brush up" work that lead to him being credited on the final film alongside Laughlin. New scenes were added in reshoots in 2000 including a divorce mediator played by Henry, closure scenes, and a subplot featuring Charlton Heston and Andie MacDowell resulting in the final production budget being somewhere around $90-125 million. The film was finally released into theaters in April of 2001 where New Line knew they had a bomb on their hands and kept the marketing to a minimum with no press screenings. Critics who reviewed the film were predominantly negative, and the film made a mere $10 million against its budget. Most of the cast and crew were fine. Director Peter Chelsom averted the crashing of his Hollyowood career thanks to the success of Serendipity the same year as Town & Country, but Warren Beatty wouldn't appear in another film until 2016's Rules Don't Apply, and with the simultaneous failure of Shandling's What Planet Are You From?, he'd never headline another movie except for doing voicework in Dreamworks' Over the Hedge. Looking back on Town & Country very little of it has stayed in the minds of those who saw it with the most notable aspect of it being its ridiculous budget. At it's core Town & Country seems like a mixture of Woody Allen-esque midlife crisis relationship dramaedy and sex farce and doesn't do either that well.

When the movie begins it starts by establishing Beatty's Porter as unfaithful to his wife with a scene of Natassja Kinski naked playing a cello, not that you actually see anything as it's very Austin Powers in its handling of nudity. From this scene onward the movie doesn't seem like it knows how to handle this subject because there's not really any indication of any problems in Porter and Ellie's marriage and most of the setup in the beginning is just odd with a weird aspect of humor being the random people living at Porter and Ellie's apartment. When we get the reveal of Griffin's infidelity, the catalyst is a phone call given to Mona and we never find out who was on the other end of that phone call and the same thing happens a few scenes later when Ellie is called by someone, we again don't know who, and the movie just flies off the rails in the last 40 minutes with a weird subplot involving Andie MacDowell's Eugenie whom Porter met on a plane in Louisiana and coincidently ended up running into her in Sun Valley while on a bonding trip with Griffin and the movie just gets dumber and dumber with all these nonsensical turns until it just flatly concludes.

Town & Country isn't insightful enough to be a relationship dramedy like an Allen film, but it's also too leaden to be a sexually charged farce either. The movie feels like two halves of two not particularly good movies stapled together. It's not abrasive annoying or unwatchable (maybe the final 40 minutes come close) but it's very sub sitcom levels of story and humor that are well beneath the talents of its cast.