Did You Hear About the Morgans?

Editorial

There is a big school of thought that says Hugh Grant is only able to play one role: the self-effacing Englishman with a charming inability to get a sentence out without frequent pause for looking unsure that he should ever have started. Probably true, but who cares when he does it so well? Clint Eastwood’s always hacked off with the rest of the world. Stephen King’s written a disproportionate amount of horror.

So, whatever you imagine you’re going to get from a rom-com in which Grant plays a British lawyer forced to go into witness protection in Hicksville, Wyoming, with his estranged New Yorker wife, that’s exactly what you’re going to get. And it’s sort of comforting.

Here he tries his best to be polite to rednecks when he finds himself in a town so uncosmopolitan that, of course, it contains Wilford Brimley. Grant always carries instructions on evading bear attack, and then resorts to blustery chit-chat when actually confronted by one. He strives to win his wife back via the medium of jogging. Evidently, the material’s far from the best he’s worked with — it’s frankly not even close — but you couldn’t ask him to do much more with it.

Sarah Jessica Parker isn’t quite so reliable. She’s a highly talented comic actress, but she can seem brittle on screen and doesn’t have the immediacy of some of Grant’s other recent leading ladies. You don’t warm to her as quickly as a Bullock or a Barrymore. It takes a long while for the chemistry between she and he to achieve even the slightest fizz, but it comes eventually in a wooing scene that squishes in a high concentration of laughs and sweetness that should have been eked out across the rest of the film.

Comedically, the whole thing’s, well, fine. There aren’t any lines that stick in the head after the lights come up, but there aren’t really any terrible clunkers either. The Morgans saunters right down the middle of the road, inspiring neither enough emotion to truly love it, nor enough passion to actually hate it; just the odd titter and a feeling of relief whenever Sam Elliott sidles on as — what else — a kindly law man with a big moustache. (The actor being the cinematic equivalent of a car airbag, assurance that we’re all likely to come out of this okay.)

Did You Hear About The Morgans? is completely vanilla, devoid of surprise or upset; the sort of film to see if you’re passing and it happens to be raining.