Grant plays the same bumbling Brit in latest comedy
”
Did You Heart About the Morgans?
”
may have been billed as a comedy, but most of the movie deals
with the serious marital problems of Meryl (Sarah Jessica Parker)
and Paul Morgan (Hugh Grant). The two Manhattanites are separated,
though Paul is desperately trying to win his wife back. They are
both wrapped up in their own careers, Meryl as a high-powered real
estate agent and Paul as a high-powered lawyer, so there doesn’t
seem much hope in them rekindling their romance.
Grant plays the same bumbling Brit in latest comedy
“Did You Heart About the Morgans?” may have been billed as a comedy, but most of the movie deals with the serious marital problems of Meryl (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Paul Morgan (Hugh Grant). The two Manhattanites are separated, though Paul is desperately trying to win his wife back. They are both wrapped up in their own careers, Meryl as a high-powered real estate agent and Paul as a high-powered lawyer, so there doesn’t seem much hope in them rekindling their romance.
The movie is written and directed by Mark Lawrence who also wrote “Two Weeks Notice” and “Music and Lyrics.” Grant’s performance in this latest movie is not much different than his turn in those ones, although he had much more chemistry with Sandra Bullock than he does with Sarah Jessica Parker. The characters and situations might be different, Grant plays the dry-witted, bumbling Brit he often portrays once again. Sarah Jessica Parker plays a New Yorker who likes nice clothes and shoes, not unlike her most well-known role in “Sex in the City.”
The two can hardly function without assistants Jackie (Elisabeth Moss) and Adam (Jesse Liebman) so Lawrence used a somewhat convoluted circumstance to separate the two from their work. Meryl just happens to agree to have dinner with Paul and they just happen to walk to a house she has to show a real-estate client (at 9 at night.) They just happened to arrive right when the client is shot dead and the sharp shooter is dumb enough not to be wearing a mask. The bad guy is somehow related to mobsters that the U.S. marshals have been tracking. Meryl and Paul are not really safe in the city because her face is plastered all over town in real estate ads so the marshals send them off to Wyoming.
It’s a place as foreign to the Londoner and New Yorker as Siberia. A big city is hours away, and the closest little city is still a 45-minute drive. There are bears and wilderness to worry about.
The couple stays with Clay Wheeler (Sam Elliot,) a U.S. marshal who is set to retire, and his wife Emma (Mary Steenburgen,) who is the sheriff of the small town of Ray. The cover story is that Meryl is Clay’s cousin from Chicago, and their last name is Foster.
The first stumbling block comes when the couple discovers that the Wheelers are avid hunters and meat eaters. Meryl is a member of a PETA and a vegetarian. The next stumbling block is when the couple realizes there is only one extra bedroom in the small house. Meryl opts for the couch instead of sleeping in the same space as her estranged husband. She stays up nights watching Westerns since the Wheelers don’t have cable, let alone satellite. The couple also lacks access to a phone and the Internet, as the Wheelers are worried they might reveal their whereabouts to family or friends, and by default the killer who is after them.
Meryl and Paul start to feel a little stir crazy, and their fighting at night is keeping the Wheelers awake. It is their late-night fights that start to reveal to viewers some of the issues that led to their separation. Paul was unfaithful, but before that they had been struggling to have a baby, with months of fertility treatments and hormones and plenty of disappointments. Being in Wyoming without much to do, the two are forced to talk out their problems.
One of the main issues with the movie is that it is hard to believe that two workaholics would really be able to give up checking at the office quite so easily. Paul and Meryl are without their cell phones, without an Internet connection and yet they move on quickly from work worries. The other inconsistency in the movie is that after Clay tells the couple the city of Ray is a 45-minute drive from where they live, Paul and Meryl are shown jogging into town on a regular basis. Seems like a 45-minute drive would be quite a marathon to endure each day.
But the biggest issues is that the movie moves along at a slow pace at points, as the Morgans get to know the residents of Ray, and themselves better. Meryl tells Paul she has been considering adoption on her own, and he talks about his fears of being a bad father. They seem on the road to mending things when they finally get the news that their permanent sites are ready – two sites in two different cities as they requested in New York.
Of course, somewhere along the line Meryl has to call someone in New York who calls Meryl’s assistance. Her assistant then gets the phone number from the person and calls Meryl, inadvertently revealing the Morgan’s location to the killer who tracks them down in Wyoming.
The movie ends on a very predictable note, and the slow pace of the movie mixed with the lackluster jokes make this movie one to hold out on until it is released on DVD.
Melissa Flores can be reached at mf*****@pi**********.com. For more Movie Lines, see her blog at melissa-movielines.blogspot.com, which features posts about films, food, TV and more, including a recent year in review that names the best and worst movies made in 2009.
