{"id":12747,"date":"2025-08-08T16:56:25","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T20:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=12747"},"modified":"2025-08-08T16:56:25","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T20:56:25","slug":"town-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2025\/08\/08\/town-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Town & Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Town & Country <\/strong>(2001)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 New Line\/Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 104 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (sexuality and language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Peter Chelsom\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Michael Laughlin and Buck Henry\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Rolfe Kent\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: William A. Fraker\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: April 27, 2001 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Garry Shandling, Andie MacDowell, Nastassja Kinski, Jenna Elfman, Charlton Heston, Marian Seldes, Josh Hartnett, Tricia Vessey, Azura Skye, Holland Taylor.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $6.7M (US)\/$10.3M (World)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: *<\/p>\n

\u00a0Town & Country<\/strong> holds the distinction of being one of the biggest box office flops EVER! I could see it coming from a mile away. All the sure signs of a money-losing megaflop were right there. The inflated production cost ($90 million?!), the production delays, the many re-writes and re-shoots, the ever-changing release dates (12 times!) and no pre-release screenings. What more do you need, a big flashing neon sign?<\/p>\n

\u00a0It struck me funny that more people showed up to see One Night at McCool\u2019s that Saturday night at the multiplex. I saw both movies that same night and it looked like people were more interested in a little movie starring Matt Dillon (Drugstore Cowboy), Paul Reiser (Mad About You) and Liv Tyler (Stealing Beauty) than a big movie starring three Oscar winners like Warren Beatty (Reds), Diane Keaton (Annie Hall) and Goldie Hawn (Cactus\u00a0 Flower). It\u2019s just as well because Town & Country<\/strong> is a terrible picture. It\u2019s a perfect illustration of Murphy\u2019s Law as everything that could have possibly gone wrong did go wrong. Horribly wrong! It\u2019s bad on the level of Ishtar (another Beatty movie!). It\u2019s so jaw-droppingly bad that it\u2019s actually kind of interesting. Much like 1994\u2019s North, it\u2019s interesting in the way a horrible train wreck is interesting. You know you shouldn\u2019t look, but you just can\u2019t take your eyes away.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Town & Country<\/strong> stars Beatty as Porter Stoddard, a famous New York architect who has an affair with a beautiful cellist (Kinski, Cat People). He feels horribly guilty about it and debates whether or not to tell his wife of 25 years Ellie (Keaton). It doesn\u2019t help matters any that their best friends Mona (Hawn) and Griffin (Shandling, What Planet Are You From?) are getting divorced after she finds out that he\u2019s been cheating on her.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Things go from bad to worse after Porter has a sexual encounter with Mona. Ellie finds out about her husband\u2019s affair with the cellist and throws him out of the apartment. Porter fools around with other women including hardware store clerk Auburn (Elfman, Dharma & Greg) and wealthy head case Eugenie (MacDowell, sex, lies and videotape). The climactic scene takes place at an awards dinner for interior decorator Ellie. All of the principal characters show up and it\u2019s supposed to be hilarious. It\u2019s not!<\/p>\n

\u00a0In fact, nothing even remotely amusing happens in this movie. The worst part of Town & Country<\/strong> has to be the sequence where Porter meets Eugenie\u2019s equally crazy family. Her father (Heston, True Lies) is a homophobic gun nut and her mother (Seldes, Home Alone 3) rides around in a wheelchair making inappropriate sexual remarks. At one point, he walks right into his daughter\u2019s bedroom while she\u2019s in bed with Porter. Forget that they\u2019re just playing with her stuffed animal collection; there\u2019s something very wrong about this. This whole sequence is more disturbing than it is funny. It\u2019s compounded by the obvious fact that Heston\u2019s health was starting to fail while he shot this movie. It\u2019s as bad as Richard Pryor\u2019s performance in 1991\u2019s Another You. I can\u2019t laugh at somebody who\u2019s dying right in front of me.<\/p>\n

\u00a0A lot of Town & Country<\/strong> barely makes any sense. For example, don\u2019t you think that Ellie would find out at some point that Porter also slept with Mona? She doesn\u2019t. The subject of Griffin\u2019s homosexuality comes up now and then, but wouldn\u2019t it have made more sense to come right out and admit his sexual orientation rather than let everybody think that he slept with another woman? The way it\u2019s handled here might make sense in 1975, but it doesn\u2019t in 2001. There\u2019s a scene at a costume party that doesn\u2019t have any kind of a payoff although I can\u2019t really imagine what the writers could do with the idea of Warren Beatty wearing a bear costume. More accurately, I can\u2019t imagine anything that would make sense in this so-called adult comedy.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Town & Country<\/strong> is supposed to be a throwback to the kinds of adult-oriented comedies that used to come out in the 70s. It deals with adultery and that\u2019s where part of the problem lies. Thanks to the trashy subject matter of TV shows like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich, adultery doesn\u2019t seem like that big of a deal anymore. By comparison, it\u2019s the least of all evils concerning marriage and sex. In short, it\u2019s a boring and outdated concept for a comedy. It\u2019s definitely NOT a $90 million idea. Nevertheless, the producers went ahead and made the movie. I guess they figured with all the big stars attached to the project, it might actually turn a profit. Oh, how wrong they were!<\/p>\n

\u00a0All of the actors turn in embarrassing performances except for Keaton. She might as well have phoned in her performance for all the life she puts into it. Sadly, Heston turns in the absolute worst performance of the bunch. It would also turn out to be one of his final film roles. The actors don\u2019t even appear to have any chemistry between them. I find this very curious since the three leads have all worked together before. Beatty and Keaton starred in Reds (1981). Beatty and Hawn appeared in Shampoo (1975) together. Keaton and Hawn were co-stars in The First Wives Club (1996).<\/p>\n

\u00a0I have an idea of where the $90 million went and it wasn\u2019t just into the actors\u2019 bank accounts. Town & Country<\/strong> takes place in Manhattan, the Hamptons and Sun Valley, Idaho. The Stoddards have a gorgeous apartment in Manhattan and a beautiful country house in the Hamptons. Griffin has a nice cabin in Sun Valley. He and Porter visit a luxurious ski resort. Eugenie\u2019s family lives in a mansion in Sun Valley. Do you see where I\u2019m going with all of this? The movie is all about real estate. Take away the actors and you have several nice photo spreads for Town & Country magazine. It must have cost a fortune to shoot in all of these places.<\/p>\n

\u00a0This is also the nicest thing that I can say about Town & Country<\/strong>. It\u2019s one of the clumsiest, clunkiest attempts at comedy that I\u2019ve ever seen. For one thing, isn\u2019t Beatty too old for this kind of role? He displays the kind of reckless behavior one would expect from somebody having a mid-life crisis. The idea of a 64YO man playing a reluctant Casanova represents some of the most grievous miscasting that I\u2019ve seen since Stockard Channing played a high school senior in Grease. I don\u2019t even think that Blake Edwards could have salvaged this movie. I can\u2019t blame this entire mess on director Peter Chelsom (Hear My Song, Serendipity); I\u2019m sure he didn\u2019t have too much control over the proceedings given the involvement of notorious control freak Beatty. There\u2019s plenty of blame to go around, but I\u2019m not going to sit and point fingers. I\u2019m simply going to say that this movie is an out-of-control mess. You\u2019re better off just cancelling your subscription.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Town & Country (2001)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 New Line\/Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 104 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (sexuality and language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Peter Chelsom\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Michael Laughlin and Buck Henry\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Rolfe Kent\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: William A. Fraker\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: April 27, 2001 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Garry Shandling, Andie MacDowell, Nastassja Kinski, Jenna Elfman, Charlton Heston, Marian Seldes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12771,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedies","category-this-sucks-so-bad"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Town-Country-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12747"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12773,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12747\/revisions\/12773"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}