Subject: Review: What Planet Are You From? (2000)

From: Bill Chambers <[email-masked]>
Date: 3 Mar 2000 06:18:10 GMT

WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM?
**1/2 (out of four)
-a review by Bill Chambers ([email-masked])

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starring Garry Shandling, Annette Bening, John Goodman, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Garry Shandling, Michael Leeson, Ed Solomon, Peter Tolan
directed by Mike Nichols

To paint a picture of how immature Mike Nichols’ What Planet Are You
From? can get, its McGuffin is a vibrating penis. The film stoops,
often, to a level of humour rarely used outside the schoolyard—or an
episode of “Married With Children”. Yet there’s an infectious sunshine
in its comedy; Garry Shandling’s first big screen starring vehicle
revels in impropriety without lapsing into bad taste. My problems with
What Planet Are You From? generally lie outside its sense of humour.

A Star Wars-style credit crawl recounts the development of a faraway
planet populated entirely by brilliant, emotionless men. Their leader
(Ben Kingsley) has chosen galactic domination as their next course of
action, starting with Earth. One lucky citizen will be outfitted with an
electric schlong and transported via some bizarre molecular charge to
America, natch, where he will be expected to impregnate an earthling
woman. “Harold Anderson” (Shandling) proves himself up to the challenge
in a series of ignorantly designed tests on the art of courtship.
Harold’s ‘spaceship’ crashes into a plane bound for Phoenix; he begins
work immediately upon exiting the tiny lavatory, flirting unsuccessfully
with a harried flight attendant (Judy Greer) and a passenger
(Shandling’s receptionist from “The Larry Sanders Show”, Janeane
Garofalo) who has been frightened by the faux turbulence. (“I like your
shoes,” he tells her as she cries out for comfort.) On ground, Harold
immediately lands an upper-level job at a non-descript financial
institution, where he seeks out dating advice from philandering
co-worker Perry (Greg Kinnear).

Following a few aborted flings, Harold meets recovering alcoholic Susan
(a game Annette Bening), with whom he shares a desire to have a baby.
They marry in Vegas and have a 21-hour honeymoon of non-stop sex. Like
many a horn dog before him, Harold misunderstands his duties as a
provider of emotional support thereafter, and would rather watch TV than
discuss feelings with his wife.

The film’s witty hook is that Susan can’t tell the difference between a
man and an alien—moreover, that a member of a notoriously unsympathetic
alien race is anthropologically indistinguishable from sleazy Perry or
Roland Jones (John Goodman), a neglectful airline insurance
investigator. (Jones allows his marriage to disintegrate in his quest to
expose Harold’s secret identity.) As a result, Harold and Susan’s
interstellar divide is, amusingly, a non-issue. Still, it’s not news
that the sexes are eternally, and maybe extraterrestrially, engaged in
silent battle, and whenever What Planet Are You From? gets its mind out
of the gutter long enough to be about long term relationships, it is no
more revelatory than a night at “Yuk Yuk”’s. (A little vibrating penis
goes a long, long way.)

As the man responsible for The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,
and Carnal Knowledge, director Nichols specializes in stories that
explore the male-female dynamic, which probably made him seem the ideal
choice to mount a quasi-adaptation of John Gray’s soupy reference book
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Yet What Planet Are You From?’s
guiding hand could be mistaken for that of John Landis or Amy
Heckerling, especially given the preponderance of skin and the shabbier
edges of the material (neither filmmaker is famed for his/her scrutiny):
the corners of the blasé plot don’t always meet and Bo Welch’s
outerspace sets are derivative of Men in Black’s gleaming headquarters,
which he also designed.

Lacking any unique political perspective, What Planet Are You From? is a
high-profile T&A comedy, albeit an enjoyable one. The tone of  the film
is pleasantly relaxed and awfully sweet—we’re barely alerted to the
climax before it happens and get to spend a lot of quality time with
Bening as she charms in spades. Shandling is droll, as always (as a
devoted fan of “...Larry Sanders...”, I admit a certain bias to the
scrunch-faced actor), and, as Harold begins tearing down his emotional
girders and taking responsibility for his actions, he displays an
oft-muted warmth in full-force. (Shandling also makes off with the best
line in the movie, say I, though to reveal it is to spoil many
surprises.)

Others in the ensemble are not so successful, notably Kinnear, who
fritters away the clout earned from an Oscar nomination in a role that
has Sam McMurray (who played the wife-swapping boss of Nicolas Cage’s
character in Raising Arizona) written all over it. And what the heck are
Linda Fiorentino and Ben Kingsley doing there? If Nichols didn’t have
the reputation of a Woody Allen or a Robert Altman, and if the project
didn’t necessitate hiring big names to elevate its cachet beyond that of
another coming-of-human tale, casting choices may have been a little
less all-star perfunctory, and subsequently improved the picture.

-March, 2000