![[box cover]](../../reviewimgs/t/townandcountry.jpg)
Town and Country
Excruciatingly mundane and flaccid, Town and Country plays like an episode of Friends for the landed gentry. Despite an all-star cast, which includes Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Garry Shandling, and Goldie Hawn, the film's weak opening scenes give the viewer few clues for navigating the meandering and mostly meaningless plot. Beatty and Keaton are a wealthy, seemingly happy New York couple with all the accoutrements money can buy. They even seem to like each other. Their best friends, Goldie Hawn and Garry Shandling, also appear to be the perfect couple, living in luxury in their beautiful home with lots of time on their hands for enjoying the finer things. But when Beatty finds himself having a brief affair with a cellist (Nastassja Kinski) and Shandling gets caught cheating on his wife, both these men (professional, successful men ostensibly running multi-million-dollar businesses) are, for some inexplicable reason, shocked to find that their wives are angry about their behavior. The rest of the film is spent watching these two befuddled fools stagger through one ridiculous situation after another as though they were caught in a continuous loop of Three Stooges skits. Vacillating between comedy hijinks— involving things like polar bear suits and gun-toting incestuous fathers — and the spewing of moralistic platitudes about love and honor — Town and Country is a hodgepodge of '80s attitudes and Yuppie sentiments. Costing reportedly as much as $80 million due to production overruns and massacred by the critics when it was released in 2001, this film rightfully died a swift death at the box office and should serve as an embarrassment to all involved. New Line's DVD offers widescreen (1.85:1) and standard transfers in Dolby Digital 5.1. Theatrical trailer, cast-and-crew filmographies. Snap-case.
—Kerry Fall
