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

From: "Sean P. Molloy" <[email-masked]>
Date: 8 Mar 2000 07:20:16 GMT

What Planet Are You From? (1/2* out of ****)
Starring Garry Shandling, Annette Bening
Directed By Mike Nichols
Columbia Pictures, Rated R, 2000
Running Time: 1 Hour 40 Minutes

By Sean Molloy

[MEDIUM SPOILERS]

When I watch a movie like Mike Nichols' What Planet Are You From? I can't
help
but feel like everyone is looking at me. It's as if all the audience is
gazing
at the back of my head in the darkness, eyes shooting daggers, quietly
blaming
me for the fact that they paid hard-earned money to spend their time
watching
this... this... thing. I shift uncomfortably in my seat. I'm reminded of how
I
feel when I see a pair of second- or third-rate celebrities engaging in a
teleprompted "funny" conversation to introduce the next Blockbuster award.
It's
not my fault, I know it's not my fault, but dammit, someone's gotta be
embarrassed, because it doesn't look like anyone on the screen is ready to
take
the blame.

I'm about to give you a list of names of people who are gonna make a movie
together: Garry Shandling, Annette Bening, John Goodman, Greg Kinnear, Mike
Nichols. Do any of these names make you instantly shudder? The answer I
would
have come up with before today is no, this is quite a list of talented
individuals we've got here. Granted, John Goodman was in The Flintstones,
and
Greg Kinnear has turned in some less-than-lackluster leading man
performances in
certified failures like A Smile Like Yours, but even so, they've got proven
power as excellent supporting players. Garry Shandling has two television
classics under his belt, his ingenious little It's Garry Shandling's Show
and
The Larry Sanders Show. And for God's sake, Mike Nichols directed The
Graduate,
and Annette Bening is just walking away from American Beauty.

So explain this... this... thing.

What Planet Are You From? purports to be a comedy exploring the relationship
between men and women satirizing the whole pop-psychology Mars/Venus
phenomenon.
But what this movie winds up being is a collection of unfunny
cringe-inducing
moments coupled with uninsightful cringe-inducing moments; the end result
is,
unsurprisingly, an unfunny, uninsightful, cringe-inducing, thoroughly icky
embarrassment.

Garry Shandling plays an alien from a planet populated by technologically
advanced but emotionally vacant males (they reproduce through cloning, of
course). His leaders put a select group of males through a series of tests
designed to determine which one is most fit to fly off to Earth, find a
female
of the species, and impregnate her. They're taught how to pretend that
they're
listening by nodding and saying "uh-huh," and how to compliment shoes.
Imagine
my delighted surprise when, oh heavens, all their carefully practiced
tactics
turn out to fail miserably, producing comedic results! The lucky winner is
fitted with a penis (since theirs, after generations of disuse have long
since
shrunk out of existence... I will restrain myself from mentioning the
implausibility of such a scenario since the population has stopped evolving
due
to the fact that they're all just clones... whoops, too late.) The penis,
when
aroused, tends to make a humming noise. The writers, when frequently
strapped
for ideas, tend to turn to this as a source of "comedy." It isn't funny the
first time. It isn't funny the eighth time. It isn't funny the eighteenth
time.
If anything, it made me feel vaguely self-conscious.

Garry meets up with a coworker at a bank played by Greg Kinnear, who turns
out
to be a generic, unlikable scumbag. He's meant to fill the part of
unfortunate
role model for Shandling's alien character, but he's so flatly drawn that
even
the writers quickly give up and toss him aside. Kinnear's scumbagginess is
demonstrated by the fact that he claims other peoples' work as his own to
worm
his way into a Vice Presidents' position and goes to AA meetings to pick up
chicks. Wow. What a magnificent bastard.

Nearly every man in the movie, in fact, is played as the same sort of
sex-driven
slimeball. When Kinnear's wife walks into the office, there isn't a single
guy
who doesn't trip, bump into a wall, or otherwise pratfall as if they'd never
seen a woman before. The few guys that aren't particularly slimeballs, such
as
John Goodman's detective character, are simply uncommunicative workaholics.

Shandling meets up with Annette Bening, who will inevitably prove to be the
love
he never knew existed, at one of Kinnear's AA meetings. Shandling's mission
is
to have a baby, and when he reveals his desires to her, Bening instantly
falls
for him, and the next day... they get married. Yup. The next day. Cuz ya
see, it
turns out she wants a baby too!

Bening's character perhaps was the most difficult to watch, especially after
seeing her come apart at the seams so effectively in American Beauty... if
her
character here is supposed to be representing the female of the species as a
whole, then woe, I say, to the species. She's unfathomably insecure, and
succumbs so easily to all of Shandling's lines and lies that it borders on
tragic. There's a point where, after thinking she may not be able to bear
children, she learns that she is indeed pregnant. When Garry comes home
after
nearly cheating on her, she strolls into the kitchen and sings "High Hopes"
(you
know, the uplifting ant and the rubber tree plant song) to deliver the news,
and
then says to him, "now you can't leave me." We're supposed to empathize with
Shandling's discovery of the feeling of "guilt," but instead I wanted to
weep
for Bening that she was placing her entire life and soul firmly in the lap
of a
great big nothing. And eventually, Shandling falls in love with her... for
real,
I suppose, though I'm not sure exactly what prompted it.

What's the message I derive from all this? Men are liars, inherently empty
creatures, but if you hang around long enough... well, maybe something will
click. Ha ha... ha? I'm thankful such broad cynicism isn't frequently
allowed to
run so rampant.

Let's all join hands and pray that the planet these folks are from is not
this
one.

There's also a subplot involving John Goodman as an airline incident
investigator that wades in the bog of stupidity. Goodman, through a series
of
astoundingly implausible realizations, puts together the fact that Shandling
is
a being from another world with a magic, vibrating penis. It has all the
makings
for a subplot of having Shandling be discovered, that, thankfully, never
comes
to the inevitable hackneyed fruition. Instead, it just dangles limply on the
branch for a while, withers, and falls away. Further proof that Goodman
should
just stick to doing Coen Brothers movies.

But let's not dwell on this any longer, I've already wasted plenty of your
time
and my own. Let's move on, forget about what we've seen here, and get on
with
our lives. And to help us out, let's end things on a happy note...
Congratuations go out to Annette Bening, winner of this week's "Title!"
award,
for delivering the awkward line of dialog containing the movie's name.

Way to go, Annette!

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