Friday, Jul 25, 2008
In his latest dissection of the gender gap, the director of the great "Carnal Knowledge" trades earnest sexual consideration for a cheap, vibrating sight gag.
Mar 21, 2000 | With "What Planet Are You From?" Mike Nichols returns to erectile dysfunction, subtext if not subject of his best movies. If George Segal couldn't hump the hostess in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" he'd become Liz and Dick's houseboy. Benjamin, "The Graduate," obviously relieved to get it up with Mrs. Robinson, is even more uneasy with her daughter.
The specter of E.D. especially haunts Nichols' masterpiece, "Carnal Knowledge," and its hero. Jack Nicholson, at the top of his seething form in 1971, plays Jonathan from college dances in the '50s to age 40 in the dawn of women's lib. "Girls today all want your money or your balls or both" has become Jonathan's defining problem by 30. It's harder for him to get it up as women get harder to dominate.
The character is a case study, deadly specific and rooted in history. But the movie taps into some secret brotherhood, a network of cold, dirty tunnels, highly pressurized, that runs underneath men. What Jonathan spews is recognizable bile, even if a woman had only heard it rumbling before. I first saw the movie in college, and I wanted to get spayed afterward.
"What Planet," on the other hand, put me in mind of a lobotomy. Screenwriter Garry Shandling plays an alien from an all-male planet. They wear identical jumpsuits. They've had their penises and emotions "bred out" of them. They reproduce by cloning. They decide to take over Earth (it's all gone over pretty vaguely in the movie, too) by breeding with its women.
Shandling is the advance man for the sneak invasion, outfitted with brief instructions for getting women in bed and a whirring mechanical penis. His crotch buzzes whenever he's aroused, which happens pretty much whenever he's near a woman. Thus the hunched-over Groucho walk becomes a sound gag.
The 68-year-old director told Entertainment Weekly that "men would get the joke ... about the hard-ons you wish you could control." But this is E.D. most men past 18 dream about. In what may be a casting in joke, Shandling is paired with Mrs. Super Stud, Annette Bening. She and the alien do it 126 times on their weeklong honeymoon.
Back on Planet Guy, the dudes are as generic in their jumpsuits as the movie's tired "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" riffs. The spacemen's faces are identically puzzled as they process the tips for seducing women: Compliment their shoes, tell them they smell nice, say "uh-huh" so they think you're listening to their prattle.
It's the same watered-down misogyny that dribbles out of sitcoms, those forwarded e-mail jokes, stand-up comedy, Dave Barry and his imitators, self-help books and Nora Ephron movies. The refrains are so familiar they're like a prayer to normalcy, and they all turn up in "What Planet": She waits till the game's on to talk about her feelings! She says the opposite of what she means! She wants to know what I'm thinking!
What protects product like "What Planet" from charges of sexism is the equally dull-edged male-bashing balancing it. Men never ask for directions! They need to hold the remote control! An emotionless alien with a strap-on is still better than Bening's Earth boyfriends!
A couple so alienated that one doesn't notice the other's from another planet could be a premise as dark as outer space. The Nichols of 30 years ago would have ventured there, but now he trots out beer commercial truisms to explain the gulf between his characters. His movies used to diagnose sexual dysfunction, but the new one dispenses a weirdly cynical prescription: You can't know that alien you work and live and reproduce with, so don't bother trying. As a matter of fact, that incomprehension is love.
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