MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Marrying Man’: More Off Again Than On

“The Marrying Man” (citywide) opens with a crucial mistake. We’re told, just before the film lapses into flashback, that the couple we’re about to observe ended up marrying three times. By the time the first marriage is kaput, so is the film. Two marriages later, you may feel like you don’t know anything more about the couple than when you started. And there’s still one more marriage in the offing.

Alec Baldwin plays Charley Pearl, the playboy heir to a toothpaste fortune, engaged to the daughter (Elisabeth Shue) of a studio mogul (Robert Loggia). On a bachelor party weekend in Las Vegas with his buddies, Charley claps eyes on Kim Basinger’s Vicki Anderson, a gorgeous nightclub singer and Bugsy Siegel’s main squeeze. What follows is an eight-year, on-again-off-again romance cluttered with broken engagements, broken marriages, broken bones.

Neil Simon, who wrote the screenplay, is on to a terrific comic premise: A man who continually remarries the same woman is a man worth making a movie about. (Simon himself is married to his ex-wife.) But no one involved in this film seems to have figured out what kind of movie to make. Parts of it are clearly meant to be clever and brisk and deliberately fluffy, a la early Neil Simon. Other parts are more in the later Simon mode--his heartfelt bickering mode. Neither works. The director, Jerry Rees, a former animator, doesn’t have a particularly light touch; when the film turns lugubrious and Charley and Vicki start hollering at each other, you feel as if lead weights have been attached to your ankles.

If Baldwin and Basinger had such kapowie chemistry together that they set the screen on fire, then maybe “The Marrying Man” would have made sense. But they don’t really make for a great match, and given the film’s premise, that’s a fatal problem. The crazy lust that would make these two keep going at each other year after year and marriage after marriage just isn’t on the screen.

Baldwin seems more comfortable in his slapstick scenes, like the one where Bugsy (Armand Assante) surprises Charley and Vicki in mid-romp. His timing has a snap to it. Basinger certainly has the drop-dead sultriness that the role requires, but she doesn’t make much use of her looks as an actress. If all the role required her to do was look goddessy, she’d be fine, but Simon has written the part for an actress who can shift from sex cartoon to tragedienne, and that’s way out of Basinger’s range.

It may be out of Simon’s range too. “The Marrying Man” (rated R) would have been better if it had stuck to its early, jaunty mood of ‘50s romantic reverie and chucked the serious stuff. Making Charley a toothpaste heir is a nice Preston Sturges-like touch, and his buddies, played by, among others, Paul Reiser and Fisher Stevens, are an appealing, oddball assortment. But none of these small touches amounts to much because the central relationship is so sloggy. It could be that the people who made this movie are just too sane to make a movie about romantic folly. Instead, they’ve made their own folly.

‘The Marrying Man’

Kim Basinger: Vicki Anderson

Alec Baldwin: Charley Pearl

Robert Loggia: Lew Horner

Elisabeth Shue: Adele Horner

A Hollywood Pictures presentation in Association with Silver Screen Partners IV, distributed by Buena Vista Pictures. Director Jerry Rees. Producer David Permut. Screenplay by Neil Simon. Cinematographer Donald Thorin. Editor Michael Jablow. Costumes Ruth Myers. Music David Newman. Production design William Matthews. Art director Mark Mansbridge. Set decorator Jim Duffy. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (strong language, mild sexual situations).