DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS?

Rating: 2

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? is a harmless wisp of a film that trades on Hugh Grant’s charm, Sarah Jessica Parker’s fan base, and the general good will of the audience. At least one of those three has been sorely tested by the time the end credits roll. Possibly two.
The Morgans in question are an upper-class Manhattan couple on the skids. She’s a self-made real estate magnate. He’s a high-powered lawyer who made a mistake during a drunken weekend on Los Angeles. He wants forgiveness, or at least to talk to her. She’s not interested, though she does acquiesce to a dinner to clear the air once and for all so that they can move on after their three-month separation. The dinner’s a flop, but worse, they witness a murder and get a very good look at the murderer’s face, as he does of theirs. That Jane is on the cover of magazine that week, one plastered all over the newsstands and the bus stops, makes them prime candidates for witness relocation.
In a convenient plot device, the are sent together, and bickering, to Roy, Wyoming, and not even to the tiny town itself, but beyond its outskirts and into the great outdoors with no company but each other, the married marshals protecting them (Mary Steenburgen and Sam Elliot), and a roving bear. The marshals have patrolling duties, the bear frightens both of them, and so there they are, talking to each other in the splendor of the wilderness, in a house full of stuffed deer heads. Hilarity, obviously expected to ensue of its own accord at this point by writer/director Marc Lawrence doesn’t quite.
The fish-out-of-water story works much better than the bickering-couple-still-in-love-with-each-other story. The former is cute, bolstered by Grant’s impeccable spluttering through situations novel and/or embarrassing. If the audience is asked to believe that these two sophisticated city dwellers have never set an expensively shod foot outside a major metropolitan area, it’s Grant that makes it not too much to ask, so effortlessly befuddled and acerbic is he, while also being so very polite in expected and reserved British fashion. Not too much, that is, until the film takes a hard left into stupid and never quite finds its way out again. Forget the revelatory nature of their visit to the Bargain Bin, a high-volume, low-price warehouse establishment. Forget the distzy dumb blonde with so many different jobs that she pops up everywhere the Morgans go in and around Roy once they are let out of the house. Forget even the obligatory moment when the New York marshals offer Jane the choice between dying in her beloved Big Apple, or hiding from the assassin in the country and Jane has to think about it. No, that hard left is when the marshals who run the safe house in Roy, Wyoming decide that it’s a good idea to take the tenderfoots out for target practice using live ammo in the hands of people who have never touched a gun before.
There are no surprises here. The locals are all gun-loving, Democrat-hating types full of homespun wisdom and no truck with anything citified. Naturally, the Morgans are initially aghast, and then begin to warm up to the neighborliness of it all, especially the bingo nights, for some reason. Naturally, they start to warm up to each other, too. Naturally there is a rodeo, that bear with far too much interest in the Morgans popping up continuously, and the inevitable cow-milking scene that pits Parker against a tumescent udder with painfully predictable results.
Grant, Steenburgen, and Elliot make the flick almost endurable, but once Parker has recited a Shakespeare sonnet to the Wyoming night sky, it’s all over. The actress has many talents, but this is something she should never attempt again, in the name of both literature and sanity. Savvy folksiness from Steenburgen and Elliot, and the charm that has lasted through Grant’s boyish years and matured into adulthood with him can only do so much to counter the many sins of DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS?.