Did You Hear About the Morgans?

I’M RUNNING OUT of things to say about Did You Hear About the Morgans? I have seen this romantic comedy a million times, twice this year: Once it was called New in Town, and later, The Proposal. I can’t think of anything more indicative of Hollywood’s level of creative bankruptcy than the degree to which those other films are still fresh in the public’s mind, even as this one rips them off. Did they think we wouldn’t notice?

Meryl (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Paul (Hugh Grant) are the Morgans, a successful but estranged New York couple. Neither go anywhere without their unlikable, competitive assistants, Adam (Jesse Liebman) and Jackie (Elisabeth Moss, AKA Peggy from Mad Men, in a spectacularly tragic example of how not to break into film after one’s role in a breakthrough television show). Through even bullshittier plot contrivances than usual in romantic comedies, Meryl and Paul are brought together after witnessing a murder, then placed in a witness protection program in rural Wyoming.

All of the usual city slicker/redneck jokes ensue, complete with their moldy, interminable compare-and-contrasts: hunters vs. PETA members, Bloomingdale’s vs. $5 sweaters at the “Bargain Barn”; “comic” attempts at shooting, splitting logs, riding horses, and cramming 10-gallon cowboy hats into suitcases. Are there any city slickers left who still haven’t caught on that spending time in the country solves all relationship problems, including infertility (and isn’t that really the source of all your relationship problems, wink-wink?), and it almost always involves getting to know Mary Steenburgen?

If Morgans makes any profit at all, it will prove that Americans are as dumb as the studios think we are—in which case we’ll deserve every inch of this recycled roll of tape. Let’s not depress each other further by letting that happen.