Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

MBunge Town and Country is the sort of comedy that thinks the height of humor is hearing the phrase "big, stupid cock" come out of Diane Keaton's mouth. It thinks hearing Garry Shandling yell out "I'm gay" to a ballroom full of people is just knee-slapingly funny. It thinks destroying a 25 year marriage through adultery is a punchline. If that's the sort of stuff that makes you laugh…well, maybe you ought to get some therapy.Porter Stoddard (Warren Beatty) is an rich architect, the kind of rich where he can charter a private plane to fly all the way to Paris to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his marriage to Ellie (Diane Keaton) and bring along their married best friends, Mona and Griffin (Goldie Hawn and Garry Shandling), for the party. Everything seems to be fine, except Porter is cheating on Ellie with a beautiful cellist. Oh, and Griffin is cheating on Mona with another man. And then Mona finds out Griffin is cheating but thinks it's with a woman so she ends up in bed with Porter, afterwhich Ellie finds out Porter has been cheating on her with the cellist, which leads to Porter and Griffin going to this winter resort where two more women want to have sex with Porter and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basically, Town and Country is like the most mean spirited and emotionally decadent episode ever of "I Love Lucy", where Warren Beatty plays the role of Lucy. Wait, maybe I don't want to make that analogy. Lucy getting in on with Fred is too terrible a mental picture to contemplate.This is a thoroughly unfunny comedy. It's not that there aren't lots of jokes, because there are. It's also not because the individual performers can't do comedy, because they can. It's that this movie doesn't understand that its story is usually nothing to laugh at. Adultery, betrayal, divorce and family break-up are not the backbone of light and frothy humor. You actually can be funny about such stuff, but only if you acknowledge how deep and serious such matters are. If you're going to tell a story where the main character is a guy who cheats on his wonderful wife for no apparent reason other than he's a huge jackass, the humor in such a story had either be very dark and bitter or very, very over the top. That sort of tale can work as a black comedy or some absurd spectacle, but Town and Country is neither that sharp nor that broad.Everything about this movie reeks of a pretentious yet sedate unreality. Porter cheats on his wife, but the film refuses to recognize that makes him a bad person. Mona sleeps with her best friend's husband, but the film refuses to acknowledge her as a bad person. There's a scene where Porter is at home and wakes up in the middle of the night to get a snack. As he walks down the hallway, he hears his son having sex with his girlfriend in his room, his daughter having sex with her non-English speaking boyfriend in her room and his maid having sex with her boyfriend in her room. Then the daughter's boyfriend, the maid's boyfriend and his son all join Porter in the kitchen…and absolutely none of that makes Porter even the slightest bit uncomfortable. What's obviously supposed to be funny about that situation is how freaked-out the middle aged dad gets at all the sex happening in his home. If the middle aged dad doesn't get freaked out, where's the joke? The one laugh-out-loud moment in Town and Country comes when Shandling's Griffin has a genuinely real and human reaction to another character's crazy behavior, but that's about the only bit of human realism in the whole movie.It's kind of shame how bad this film is because Beatty and Keaton have wonderful on screen chemistry. I f Beatty hadn't become the sort of obsessive perfectionist who could only make one movie every 5 years or so, he and Keaton could have had an entire career playing opposite each other like a modern Hepburn and Tracy or Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas. Goldie Hawn is okay and Garry Shandling is really just in the film for some one-liners. Andie MacDowell gives a pretty poor performance, but that's largely because her character is a contrived and phony mess that few actresses could make work. Charlton Heston hams it up as the father of MacDowell's character and his on screen wife could have come straight out of a Judd Apatow film.Town and Country is a comedy that isn't funny. The only way you might enjoy watching it is if you really hate Warren Beatty and want to laugh at him as he flops around on screen in this dying fish of a film.

moonspinner55 Warren Beatty as a stumbling, bumbling, unfaithful husband--a well-to-do architect who can't even climb onto a roof without falling off. Married to fabric designer Diane Keaton for 25 years, Beatty has a fling with his best friend's soon-to-be ex-wife while carrying on a breezy affair with a pretty cellist. While on a fishing vacation with buddy Garry Shandling, he comes close to sleeping with two other eccentric females out for a good time. Though co-written by crack comedy vet Buck Henry, "Town & Country" is slow and stupid. The skittering sort of geniality which comes with watching an all-star cast in a big-budget production is enough to hold interest for awhile, but the characters don't take shape and the jokes never materialize. The sub-plot with flirtatious Andie MacDowell bringing Beatty home to meet her bombastic parents is bad enough to stop the picture dead in its tracks, and it really never recovers from this gaping pothole. Shandling does some nice underplaying, Goldie Hawn is attractive, and Beatty has one or two amusing moments of comic confusion. Otherwise, this troubled concoction sinks like a ship of fools. *1/2 from ****

pauladan There was nothing funny about this movie, and it could have been funny. It showed no real comic respect for marriage, for women, or for the children of the skirt chaser. It was vulgar. I disliked nearly all of the main characters, not a good sign. Warren Beatty as super attractive to all these younger women--out of the question--simply not realistic at his age. So the plot rationale was poor. One younger woman, maybe, several, no. Worst scene--him together with Goldie Hawn. Trashy, embarrassing, vulgar. I wanted it to be much better than it was, because of all the major stars in it. Jenna Elfman was probably the funniest thing about this movie. Charlton Heston was a disaster, a sad parody of himself. Gary Shandling had a few good lines. But mostly all the talents were wasted. Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson did this type of plot much better in Something's Gotta Give. That movie was funny and tongue in cheek--it worked.

Carl S Lau "Town & Country" is a comedy that is neither amusing nor funny. With more than its share of ineptly written dialog and clumsily staged scenes, it is atrocious. "Town & Country" is suppose to be a humorous look at the upper middle class and the sexual misadventures of two "happily" married couples. There are too many superfluous scenes that should have been edited out of the movie because they go nowhere. Then there are the sequences in which one immediately knows what will happen, but seem to be interminably stretched out as aggravating time filler. If Warren Beatty wanted to look like a nincompoop, he has succeeded. "Town & Country" feels like a retread of past comedies, but very poorly imitated. As the jilted spouses, Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn come off fine. Andie MacDowell's character manages to pad at least another twenty minutes to the film. She displays the amazing eyesight of an eagle because, while riding in a ski lift, she can spot Warren Beatty's character from at least thirty feet away when he is dressed as a fly fisherman with a floppy hat covering all of his hair and obscuring his face, reminiscent of Jack Lemmon in "Grumpy Old Men." Nastassja Kinski, as a cellist having an affair with Beatty, received sixth billing and more than holds her own and is one of the few bright spots of this film. The opening scene has Warren Beatty watching her play the cello with her completely naked. He simultaneously confesses in a voice over that he is not interested in classical music and that he is making a mistake. The initial shot of Nastassja is from behind her in which we see two musical clefts symmetrically painted onto her naked back - except that this is a credited cello body double. The closing credits list the actors in order of appearance so that Nastassja Kinski is listed second after Warren Beatty - very clever on her part."Town & Country" was a box office dud that can best be appreciated if one is drunk.