The comedy "Did You Hear About the Morgans?" follows a highly successful Manhattan couple, Meryl and Paul Morgan (Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant), whose almost-perfect lives have only one notable failure – their dissolving marriage. But the turmoil of their romantic lives is nothing compared to what they are about to experience: they witness a murder and become targets of a contract killer. The Feds, protecting their witnesses, whisk away the Morgans from their beloved New York to a tiny town in Wyoming, and a relationship that was on the rocks threatens to end completely in the Rockies... unless, in their new BlackBerry-free lives, the Morgans can slow down the pace and rekindle the passion.
Director :
Marc Lawrence
Cast :
Hugh Grant, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sam Elliott
I know, I know. Some movies – most movies – get a bigging up before they are released and this one has had an awful littling down. No one has had a civil word to say on the subject of Did You Hear About the Morgans? The word of mouth, in this case, appears to begin with S. I spoke to some people who had seen this romcom, before settling down to watch it myself, and they had the shocked, glassy-eyed expression of people who have witnessed two buses, full of children from two separate orphanages, involved in a head-on collision...
And the littling down process hasn't been helped, particularly, by the film's star, Hugh Grant, who gave a cheerfully detached performance on television with Jonathan Ross, indicating that he wasn't exactly pinning Oscar hopes on it. His pairing with Sarah Jessica Parker doesn't look promising either, given their expressions of cod dismay, or possibly real dismay, on the poster. And yet, and yet … in a silly way, it is entertaining, the mismatch is actually weirdly plausible, and try as I might, I couldn't be grumpy about it.
Grant and Parker play the eponymous Morgans, Paul and Meryl, a super high-flying couple in Manhattan: he's a top lawyer and she's a top estate agent. But they are separated, due to Paul's infidelity, which he now desperately regrets. Walking away from a restaurant after a stilted would-be romantic dinner, which Paul has staged in the hope of a reconciliation, they witness a mob hit in a back alley. As state witnesses, they now have to be relocated to rural Wyoming under an assumed identity – and forced to share quarters as a couple – under the benign protection of local married cops, amiably played by Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen. And so the time-honoured procedure of troubled city slickers learning hometown values gets underway. SJP even learns to milk a cow, like Harrison Ford in Witness.
It's silly and zany and, as so often, Grant gives the impression that he could give slightly less than a monkey's about the whole business. But that never stops him being a very watchable comic actor, and there's a very funny joke about the respective sizes of the cops assigned to the couple's personal protection. There's also an excellent sight gag about a wealthy family in a nearby block silently suspending their breakfast to watch Meryl escaping her assassin by climbing out of her window on to her neighbour's balcony.
Grant also has a very funny mannerism of walking self-consciously along while goofily rolling his shoulders, as if he is miming "walking" in some street theatre play. So what can I say? SJP and Hugh aren't going to be taking home any statuettes for this one: but it's amiable and good-natured. There are plenty of ostensible comedies that are neither.
