(The Keaton Files is my possibly self-flagellating attempt at watching every feature film in Diane Keaton’s baffling 21st-century filmography. Spoilers should be expected.)
While it’s fun to read about legendary flops, and the ego clashes and disastrous choices that led to them, the fun stops when you consider the money involved. While your local public school is probably struggling to get funding for free lunches, 2021’s Jungle Cruise somehow cost $200 million to make, while losing over $150 million upon release. Those are incomprehensible numbers — $200 million dollars, or twice the economy of Palau, an entire island nation — for a movie that nobody asked for, and to which audience response was lukewarm at best1.
At least with a movie like Jungle Cruise, you can almost see where the money went (CGI animals don’t come cheap, after all), and obviously Disney can afford to take the hit. But what of an epic bomb like 2001’s Town & Country, a film that utilized no special effects or exotic location shoots, yet somehow, when all was said and done, cost $90 million? Where did it all go? Whose toilets was it flushed down?
Those toilets predominantly belonged to director Peter Chelsom, and star Warren Beatty, both of whom were under the impression that they were working on a comedy masterpiece, and neither of whom was willing to cede control to the other. What started as a relatively reasonable $40 million production stretched out to a three-year-long ordeal costing over twice as much, slowed down by actor unavailability, reshoots, and Beatty’s well-documented need to do fifty takes when two would be sufficient. There was also the issue of the script not being completed when filming began, and nobody being happy with what had already been written. Buck Henry was brought in not just to spruce it up, but essentially rewrite the entire thing. Picture all this happening while in the background there’s the faint ching! of a cash register, and a man in a green visor at New Line Cinema swallowing his fourth glass of Alka-Seltzer of the day.
Surely, you’re probably thinking, surely Beatty’s perfectionism resulted in a hidden gem, an underappreciated comic romp. Alas, $90 million dollars paid for a barely polished turd of a movie, a comedy so void of any humor that it feels like a surreal joke in itself. At least a flop like Cats has the decency to be interesting, even entertaining in its own bizarre way. Town & Country is stiflingly boring, a 105-minute slog about people we don’t like getting into madcap situations we don’t care about.
Beatty plays Porter Stoddard, and there’s your first problem already. You don’t name the hero of your movie Porter Stoddard, that’s a rich asshole name. Give him an everyman name like Larry Johnson so your audience can immediately feel comfortable with him, not a name that makes you think of horse farms and parents who quietly pay out settlements to get their sons out of date rape charges. Look for that and other valuable advice in my upcoming book Gena Radcliffe’s Guide to Writing More Good.
ANYWAY, in keeping with his name, Porter is, indeed, a rich asshole, a superstar architect living an outrageously privileged life with his interior designer wife, Ellie (Diane Keaton). When we meet them, they’re just returning from a Paris getaway to their lavish Fifth Avenue apartment, and when they’re not staying there they have a Hamptons mansion on the beach, and a third house in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Their cushy bubble is popped when they learn that their closest friends, Griffin (Garry Shandling) and Mona (Goldie Hawn), are splitting up after Mona discovers that Griffin has been unfaithful. Rather than be sympathetic to the situation, however, Ellie is smug about her own supposedly faithful marriage, while Porter wonders how he can make this about him. He decides it’s time to explore infidelity himself, starting an affair with Alex (Nastassia Kinski), a beautiful cello player. Porter cheats not because he wants to so much as he seems to think he’s supposed to. If this movie is trying to say anything (and that’s debatable), it’s that men are just going to cheat, because that’s what men do, and their wives can either put up with it, or get a divorce lawyer. It’s a remarkably cynical viewpoint for what’s trying to be a bawdy screwball comedy.
Ellie eventually finds out about Alex, and kicks Porter out. He and Griffin spend some time at the Sun Valley pied-à-terre, where we hit the low point of Town & Country (though that incorrectly suggests that there’s a high point). Porter meets Eugenie Clayborne (Andie MacDowell), a sexually aggressive heiress who immediately sets her sights on him. Even though they barely know each other, she invites him to spend an evening with her elderly parents, to which Porter meekly agrees. Everybody in Eugenie’s family is insane, not in a quirky way, but in a disturbing and depressing way. It’s heavily implied that she has an incestuous relationship with her gun nut father (Charlton Heston, in what I guess is supposed to be clever casting), while her wheelchair-bound mother (Marian Seldes) refers to Heston as “you old muff-diver” and complains about his “limp carrot.” Porter reacts to all of this, as he does with everything else, with what is presumably meant to be befuddlement, but just looks like boredom.
As is clearly the case when Eugenie makes her stuffed animals simulate sex as some form of foreplay, there’s no attempt to depict these characters as real people. They’re pickles for Porter to get himself out of before working things out with Ellie, as is Kinski as Alex, who gets barely five minutes of screen time, and Jenna Elfman as a gum-snapping drugstore cashier who also inexplicably attaches herself to him. They all end up in the same place at the end of the movie, after a series of contrivances so forced and absurd they’re not even worth mentioning.
The feel-good ending, in which Porter declares his undying love for Ellie and all is forgiven (though by this point he’s also slept with Mona, Ellie’s best friend), is about as unearned as movie endings get. But then again, everything about Town & Country is unearned, particularly the audience’s time and attention.
At least four writers were involved at various points in cobbling together the screenplay, and though most of them worked on far better things, they seem incapable of constructing a single fresh, funny joke here. The slapstick humor is of the “guy running around with his pants down” variety, while the screwball humor consists of ancient “colorful foreigner” gags, such as Porter’s daughter’s boyfriend who speaks no English, Porter’s maid’s boyfriend who never wears a shirt, and a group of Japanese tourists who take pictures of everything.
The sex humor is particularly grueling, as illustrated by Porter’s night with Eugenie and her Tennessee Williams-esque family, and a scene earlier in the film when Porter walks through his house in the middle of the night and overhears his adult children and his maid having noisy relations with their respective partners, all of whom inexplicably seem to live there, none of whom seem to know how a door works. But that’s a breeze compared to countless excruciating scenes of characters having conversations with each other while actually talking about two different things. It’s meant to be funny, but it just repeatedly emphasizes what the audience already knows: that all of these people are self-centered twits who don’t deserve happiness, but they get it anyway, because there’s no justice in the world.
While Beatty can barely generate the energy required to smirk (one wonders if his eyes were closed during all those rejected takes), Shandling does the best he can with a barely written character2, and Hawn does her typical shrieking dingbat routine. Keaton is, it has to be said, pretty bad, turning up the neurotic fretting to medically inadvisable levels. To be fair, though, it's impossible to make Ellie a likable, engaging character. Like Porter, she's barely listening when anyone speaks to her, and utterly uninterested in anyone else's problems unless they have some impact on her. No wonder she and Porter decide to stay together: who else would have them?
Keaton Files Ranking:
Hanging Up
A sharp stick in the eye
Town & Country
Up next: Something’s Gotta Give (2003)
Note that it barely breaking even at the box office didn’t stop Disney from announcing a sequel, because money is fake.
His character, Griffin, is eventually revealed to be gay, which the film barely addresses, though considering how everything else is handled that’s probably a blessing.
Wow! What a stinker! Everyone is so unlikeable and impossible to relate to. I’m glad I missed this one. Thanks for the review.
I remember this being in the news when it came out due to the massive budget overruns and delayed release. One of those rare turkeys that has the stench of epic failure all over it before the public even sees it.