Did You Hear About the Morgans?

The first movie in my experience to feature a Sarah Palin joke lends a glimmer of distinction to Did You Hear About the Morgans?, an otherwise excruciating romcom that finds Hugh Grant in tic-laden overdrive, his genuine charm jettisoned somewhere in the onscreen journey from New York to points west. Sarah Jessica Parker is on hand to trundle out her mightily-aggrieved-lover routine that she long ago patented on Sex and the City, but Marc Lawrence's film is probably best saved for those airplane trips that are now upon us where one isn't allowed to do anything but look at the screen. Sometimes, a blank stare is the best response.

Grant, for his part, no doubt saw the film as a reunion of sorts, given that Lawrence directed the actor in both Two Weeks Notice and Music and Lyrics, two minor efforts that nonetheless show up this latest entry as the major contrivance that it is. Though Lawrence's script comes down on the side of "this crazy little thing called love", the film itself marches to the wearying beat of its two stars' self-regard, with Parker by the final reel having adopted her leading man's every facial twitch.

The narrative animating their fluctuating romantic fortunes finds the pair playing two Manhattan careerists whose faltering marriage takes an unexpected turn when they pay jointly inadvertent witness to a murder while on the way back from a slap-up night out. Cue the need twice over for protection, and anonymity, which leads Paul and Meryl Morgan westward from New York into redneck country - specifically, rural Wyoming and a town of only 13 Democrats. There were 14 but one has apparently just died, presumably as a result of too few decent movies on view.

Away from the clamorous comforts of the Big Apple, the Morgans have to learn to live with and listen anew to one another, communing at night with the stars - that's to say, those things up in the sky - and not the East Coast fast track that, one senses, marks out both their big city routines. (He is a lawyer, she a realtor at the top end of the market.) There's putative hilarity to be had at the sight of Grant's pinched urban sophisticate having to learn to chop wood, leaving Parker's antsy Meryl the proverbial fish out of water: Can cashmere be found in a place where the milking of a cow is far more crucial?

The couple's kindly hosts are Clay and Emma Wheeler, who fall to Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen, respectively, with the casual flair of two fine actors slumming it until a real role comes along. Erstwhile Oscar winner Steenburgen (Melvin and Howard) might seem an unlikely choice to play a beady-eyed country bumpkin whose best friend on this evidence would seem to be her gun, but she and Elliott communicate an ease distinctly lacking from the two leads, as if to mirror the dictates of the plot itself. (White-haired though he is now, Elliott remains the Marlboro Man to the life.)

The specifics of the tale don't allow for too much scrutiny, not least the impression given that for all its vastness, America is sufficiently small that any East Coast loony tune would be able to pursue his enemies with impunity across the country, as the film's resident psycho does here. That the Morgans' days are potentially numbered matters less than their newfound ability to rconnect under the night sky while quoting Shakespeare in the process.

The script, of course, has its country yokel cake and eats it, too. How lovely to get a break from the pressures of the rat race, or so it would seem except that the Morgans are clearly as tied to New York City as Clay Wheeler is to his stetson. And it's simply inconceivable that so high-achieving a wife as Meryl would survive a nanosecond away from her uber-clients, even if Paul's libido does get recharged when he is displaced to a climate of rodeos and bucking, uh, broncos. Package holidays to the American outback, one assumes, are in the promotional mix.

The stars trot out shtick in the absence of characterisation, Grant so busily contorting his features that one soon wonders why the Wheelers don't have him sectioned. Parker makes her wide-eyed way through a part that once upon a time would have gone to Meg Ryan, Meryl's infertility neatly matched plot point for plot point against the infidelity that led to the couple's woes in the first place. As one might expect to be the case, not much is at stake that a ready quip or glib turn of phrase can't put right. (Among the more egregious: "Breast cancer, I'm against it," as spoken by an infinitely charitable Paul.)

And so matters proceed to the preordained feel-good ending that, in fact, has the reverse effect as the Morgans' life of luxury, Big Apple-style, is resumed. "I think he's funny; he makes me laugh," Meryl says of Paul. Thank heavens someone does.

Did You Hear About the Morgans? opens on Friday.