What Planet are You From?

with Garry Shandling, Annette Bening, Greg Kinnear, Ben Kingsley, Linda Fiorentino, John Goodman
Directed by Mike Nichols
by Christian T. Escobar

I hate to see a good punchline wasted. And in Mike Nichols’ new film, the few good punch lines are shredded by a silly, derivative excuse for a rousing sex comedy. Primarily written by Garry Shandling, I’ll be kind and say that more people worked on this script than on the Apollo space program. It’s not that this is essentially a rip-off of television’s Third Rock From the Sun; it’s that it’s done so poorly.

Harold Anderson (Garry Shandling) is a quick-learning alien from a galaxy far, far away. His mission is simple: Go to Earth and impregnate a woman so that their race can conquer our planet from the inside out. Oh, can you just smell a premise ripe with jokes? Anyway, he arrives in Arizona with a cache of bad pick-up lines that wouldn’t work in a brothel and a buzzing (or humming, if you will), makeshift penis. Yes, a buzzing penis. The aliens on his home world are all men without genitalia, so they had to build him one for his mission. Comic flair, I tell you! This is a sound-gag that’s played and played and over-played so often, I wonder who thought it was funny in the first place. So the story continues as Harold finally finds the perfect subject at an AA meeting. Susan (Annette Bening) instantly falls for Harold (and why not!). I could prattle on about the rest of the plot, but I’m too embarrassed to admit I remember it.

I can’t deny that the film has a few oasis-like spots of humor that the audience and I thoroughly enjoyed. But they’re quick and fleeting, and too often we’re left dealing with an infantile approach toward the characters and the story. I know that a comedy doesn’t always need logic to hold it together, but would an ounce of the stuff hurt the film? As for the ending, it may actually be insulting to the film-going audience.

I like Garry Shandling. I liked his first television show and I absolutely loved Larry Sanders, but this is asking too much. He does provide the only laughs the film scrapes together, and that’s just because his natural comedic ability fails to be completely extinguished by the ineffably bad plot. Annette Bening shows up as yet another real estate agent, but this time her class is under direct attack by the poor material. John Goodman has an annoying and frustrating character that irritated me so much I won’t even be able to watch Roseanne reruns for a couple of months. Linda Fiorentino plays a one-dimensional sexpot, a role she knows quite well. Greg Kinnear turns up as an underhanded, arrogant, self-absorbed scoundrel again – not much of a stretch from the Talk Soup pioneer.

Mike Nichols’ previous film was the Clinton cheerleading epic, Primary Colors. Prior to that, Nichols made a lot of fine, if not deep, films that always had a modicum of wit and style. Although I’ve always felt that he would ride his Graduate success to the six-foot box, he’s generally provided more profundity than he shows in this picture. What’s frustrating is that, despite it being a rip-off premise, it never occurred to anyone in this movie that the jokes had all been done before and in countless different places. Everyone knows that men are from Mars and women are from Venus (or however that saying goes), we don’t need another effortless comedy to tell us.