WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? **1/2 (out of four) -a review by Bill Chambers (bill@filmfreakcentral.net)
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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
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