Town & Country (2001)

The hermetically wealthy, tastefully neurotic, abalone white characters who populate Woody Allen's Manhattan based comedies of manners are models of realism and diversity compared with the expensively dressed humanoids scuttling across sterile landscapes of privilege in Town & Country. The movie, opening wide this weekend, has been delayed so long due to tinkering that a haze of flop perfume hovers over its release. Bat the cloud away, however, and the movie turns out to be simply... a failed romantic comedy. Not interestingly odious, not particularly harmful, not excitingly embarrassing, not cultishly screwed up. Just coarse, clunky, jerry rigged, and -- worst of all -- not funny.

It's that most inexplicable (and workaday) of Hollywood creations, a little idea that looked good on paper, didn't work on the set, and only got worse the more money and talent was thrown at it. It's an example of committee work at its most deadening.

Certainly the story couldn't be any tinier or more innocuous: Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton play a famous architect and his wife of 25 years, parents of two nearly grown children (Tricia Vessey and Josh Hartnett). Garry Shandling and Goldie Hawn play their best friends. The four sumptuously dressed, buffed, and exfoliated adults are very, very rich, and tasteful, and happily married. Except that each man is scratching an extramarital itch that threatens to bust up his self satisfied life. The architect's lovers include a freespirited cellist (Nastassja Kinski) who plays her instrument naked, and a sex hungry, psychologically unstable heiress (Andie MacDowell) with a creepy attachment to her stuffed animal collection and her father (Charlton Heston). The antiques dealer's girlfriend appears to be a redheaded woman.

Now, the troubles of four little people, their children, and their colorful immigrant domestic staff don't amount to a hill of beans in this Real Simple magazine world, but somewhere in this architecture is a promising premise for a comedy peopled by such glossy movie stars. The prospect of Beatty, especially -- a longtime real life lothario before he settled down in middle age -- playing a faithful family man who discovers the excitement of the illicit only a quarter of a century into his marriage is tasty. Plus, we know Keaton is one of his former loves, that Keaton and Hawn worked together on ''The First Wives Club,'' and that Beatty and Shandling bonded in ''Love Affair.''

But the premise withers before our eyes in the screenplay by Michael Laughlin and Buck Henry, a script apparently made of stapled together ''HELP ME!'' banners. (You can practically hear someone suggesting, ''how about voice-over narration?'' and another guy saying ''Yeah, and how about a scene in a divorce lawyer's office with Henry as the attorney?'') Directed with a white flag of surrender by Peter Chelsom (''Hear My Song''), these are middle-aged mannequins in search of hearts, brains, and courage (not to mention dramatic incentives, a decent plot, and dialogue that's more than a string of sight gags or punchlines).

In one of the movie's most painful misfires, the architect visits the baronial home of the batty heiress. There, MacDowell, playing a wackjob, bumps up against the rim of her comedic talent by drawling the names of her stuffed toys. Heston, flashing a terrifying fence of teeth, wields firearms with a crazy ferocity that undoes anything the actor says in defense of the National Rifle Association. And as the lady of the house, the redoubtable stage actress Marian Seldes careens around in an out of control wheelchair, shrieking unprintable obscenities. It's a crude, humiliating, laugh free, cringe worthy scene, one that demeans every actor in it -- and demeans the audience, too, by thinking we'd find it cute. That nobody involved in the movie made an executive decision to cut the scene, after three years of adjustments, is everything you need to know about this dud, which might have more aptly named ''What Planet Are You From?''

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