Word: granting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Interviewing Grant on Wednesday's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart mistakenly called the film What Happened to the Morgans? Stewart might have asked what happened to romantic comedy, once the crown jewel of Hollywood genres. At best, nothing new; at worst, it died of exhaustion. The Morgans' writer-director, Marc Lawrence, has no special gift for character nuance or witty dialogue. To him, rom-com is simply the recycling of a tired fugitive-couple premise from other bad movies (My Blue Heaven, Witless Protection) and the application of the genre's most formulaic shtick-in-trade: forcing an uncomfortable intimacy...
...shouldn't have tried a less onerous trade, like defusing IEDs or chairing the Fed. Such dark thoughts percolated during the 103 minutes I spent in the company of Did You Hear About the Morgans?, a comedy about a married couple on the outs (Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant) who, after exchanging glances with a mob hit man, are relocated in the FBI's Witness Protection Program to a Wyoming hamlet where two earth-salt older folks (Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen) teach them life lessons on why it's good to eat pork and pack a rifle. Though...
Lawrence has been plowing this fallow field for more than a decade: with Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck in Forces of Nature, Bullock and Grant in Two Weeks Notice, Michael J. Fox and a sassy child felon in Life with Mikey. He also co-wrote the Bullock vehicle Miss Congeniality, which had actual entertainment value. So why didn't Lawrence reteam with his favorite actress? Perhaps because Bullock was off making The Proposal, which is virtually the same movie - including the compulsory re-education in American values and Steenburgen as the adoptive mother figure - and with Alaska standing...
...heroine. Parker, I have to say, is a startling presence on the big screen. Large-featured, rail-thin and well-toned, she always looks as if she's just completed a session at the poshest workout spa in the gulag. But her sinewy perkiness makes an appropriate contrast to Grant's soft features and stammering charm. They are the opposites who might conceivably attract. As moneyed Manhattanites Meryl and Paul Morgan, she's a homegrown real estate agent and he's a lawyer from Chicago. But since this Grant makes no more serious an attempt to hide his English accent...
...Grant seems to think he's in a better movie, and a few times makes it better (though he was more relaxed, clever and ingratiating on The Daily Show). After his first night away from New York's 24-hour symphony of noise, Paul awakens to observe that Wyoming is "very quiet. I thought I could actually hear my cells dividing." His role as sinning husband is to confess and win his wife back, but Grant's function in the film is to provide a running commentary on Parker's cartoonishly tense career gal. ("A week ago," he tells...