‘Town & Country’: Like, Woebegone

“Town & Country,” a would-be romantic comedy that plays like “Crime and Punishment,” makes as many bad choices as its increasingly desperate characters. So many, in fact, you end up feeling more empathy for the actors trapped in it than the individuals they portray.

Take Warren Beatty. His Porter Stoddard is introduced sitting on a bed, looking troubled, beleaguered, even distraught. In front of him, a nude woman, not his wife, is playing the cello. “I just made a huge mistake,” Stoddard says in voice-over. “One any married man might make after 25 years. I promise you, this will never happen again.”

As “Town & Country” unfolds and Stoddard attempts to deal with the disastrous consequences of his behavior, the look of confusion and desperation on Beatty’s face intensifies. So much so that when his character complains to a friend, “I don’t have a lot of material to work with,” it plays like what the French call a cri de coeur, a cry from the heart, from the man himself.

As detailed in a wave of newspaper and Internet stories, the history of the much-delayed “Town & Country,” a film nearly three years in production, is so convoluted and the results so painful you’d need a war crimes tribunal, not a critic, to properly apportion blame. Even trying to describe just exactly what went wrong with this Peter Chelsom-directed film can be difficult.

In its early stages “Town & Country” seems merely tired and stale, the opposite of fresh, marked by ideas for jokes rather than things that are actually funny. Then, without warning, it goes from inept to complete disaster, sinking from indifferent to fiasco in the blink of an eye.

Stoddard, an architect, and his wife Ellie (Diane Keaton), a fabric designer, are introduced as a magazine-cover-strength New York power couple, married for a quarter-century and living on 5th Avenue with their young adult children.

As was the case with the 1930s screwball comedies “Town & Country” has designs on emulating, we’re never quite sure where the family’s money comes from, but it makes things like taking a private jet to Paris with best friends Griffin (Garry Shandling) and his wife Mona (Goldie Hawn) so much simpler.

Then the discovery of infidelity splits Mona and Griffin and, at least in theory, causes Porter to reassess his life. But as written by Michael Laughlin and Buck Henry (who has a cameo as a divorce lawyer) with reported contributions by several others, “Town & Country” can’t come up with anything interesting to do with this over-familiar midlife crisis situation.

A lot of the humor in “Town & Country” is creaky and derivative, built on shopworn notions like a fat man getting hit in the rear by a golf ball and foreigners having difficulty with the English language. Similarly, the implausible situations Porter gets into with other women, including Alex the cellist (Nastassja Kinski), Eugenie the madcap heiress (Andie MacDowell) and Auburn the outdoor girl (Jenna Elfman) are enervating rather than enlivening.

In truth, not even the film’s principal characters are particularly involving, and that includes Beatty’s woebegone husband, Keaton’s shrill wife, Hawn’s familiar woman scorned and Shandling’s smarmy strayer.

Director Chelsom, with a trio of offbeat films on his credits (“Hear My Song,” “Funny Bones,” the Sharon Stone-starring “The Mighty”), was probably hired to bring his trademark whimsy to the proceedings, but except for stray moments, that quality is not much in evidence. The more delicate the touch, the more painful it can be if it’s off the mark, and that’s the case here.

Though it’s never anywhere near as charming as it imagines itself, “Town & Country” also is not helped by its occasional forays into seriousness, by the moments when we are expected to switch gears and suddenly feel the profanity-laced pain of betrayal that the wives, especially Keaton’s Ellie, are experiencing.

Similarly miscalculated in their use of shock-value profanity are the catastrophic later sequences involving the flighty Eugenie and her cracked parents (Charlton Heston and Marian Seldes). While this aggressively unfunny group is supposed to be the modern version of wacky screwball families of the past, they come off instead as unpleasantly deranged and dangerous. No film could survive such a disastrous turn, and “Town & Country” does not even come close.

* MPAA rating: R, for sexuality and language. Times guidelines: sequences of lacerating profanity.

‘Town & Country’

Warren Beatty: Porter Stoddard

Diane Keaton: Ellie Stoddard

Goldie Hawn: Mona

Garry Shandling: Griffin

Andie MacDowell: Eugenie

Nastassja Kinski: Alex

Jenna Elfman: Auburn

In association with Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, an FR Production/Longfellow Pictures production in association with Simon Fields Productions, released by New Line Cinema. Director Peter Chelsom. Producers Andrew Karsch, Fred Roos, Simon Fields. Executive producers Sidney Kimmel, Michael De Luca, Lynn Harris. Screenplay Michael Laughlin and Buck Henry. Cinematographer William A. Fraker. Editors David Moritz, Claire Simpson. Costumes Molly Maginnis. Music Rolfe Kent. Production design Caroline Hanania. Art director Anthony Mark Worthington. Set decorator Lisa Fischer.

Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes.

In general release.