WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM?

WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? is a crude comedy that wastes its talented cast on one puerile sex joke after another. With such gifted comedians and actors as Garry Shandling, Greg Kinnear and Annette Bening populating its cast, one would think this movie couldn’t go wrong. Alas, it fails to live up to its promise: it’s just another forgettable, one-joke comedy.

The premise of WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? may give a clue to its crudeness. Garry Shandling plays the pseudonymous “Harold Anderson,” an alien from a planet whose population is ruled entirely by logic and reason, since their emotions have “evolved” into non-existence. Because they lack feelings, the aliens’ reproductive organs have shriveled. Fearing extinction, planetary leaders select Harold to travel to earth to find a woman to have his baby. Freshly armed with a mechanical, uh, reproductive instrument, Harold sets off to earth on a quest to bed a woman in two days. The movie’s running joke is the vibrating noise this mechanical instrument makes whenever – well, you don’t want to know.

Having no experience with the female sex – his planet is entirely populated by men (apparently only men are logical!) – Harold stumbles badly in his first attempts at earthly seduction. He thinks that complimenting a woman on her “footwear” is a sure path to the bedroom. Of course, he soon learns otherwise and seeks assistance in perfecting his seduction techniques from a co-worker, Perry (Greg Kinnear). (With help from his alien friends, Harold somehow lands an executive position at a bank.) The loosely married Perry is a womanizer of the lowest common denominator: first, he takes Harold to a strip club; then, he escorts him to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Perry assures Harold that 12-step meetings are perfect places to meet women – once a woman starts to cry, Perry boasts, any guy can fake enough empathy to persuade her into sex.

Amazingly, Harold does meet a woman at the AA meeting: the flaky but nice Susan Hart (Annette Bening), who inexplicably agrees to go to dinner with her new friend even after learning that Harold was only at the meeting to pick up women. On their first date, Harold expresses his desire to have a child and proposes marriage to the 40-ish Susan. Because she hears her biological clock loudly ticking, Susan accepts the offer after a day’s worth of consideration. She and Harold marry in Las Vegas and quickly commence their continual attempts to conceive. As his marriage progresses beyond mere sexual interaction, Harold learns a thing or two about women and discovers his long-dormant emotions. He even eventually falls in love with his wife!

Unfortunately, none of this is very funny, save for a handful of clever lines. Garry Shandling, who can be wonderfully droll, is thoroughly dull in his role as the sex-crazed alien, and Greg Kinnear’s comic abilities are similarly squandered. Shandling should have capitalized on his straight-man forté and played his alien as the befuddled innocent rather than the leering lecher. Shandling is frankly too unattractive to play a leading lothario; because of this, his multiple sex scenes are not only morally objectionable, but also physically repulsive. Perhaps Shandling and the handsome Kinnear should have switched roles.

It’s too late, however, to wonder about what might have been. As it stands, Annette Bening is the one bright spot in WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? (although John Goodman does have a few good moments as an over-zealous FAA investigator). As always, she slips easily into her role as the perky, vaguely New-Age Susan Hart, the woman who teaches Harold how to love. (Get it? “Hart?” Subtlety is not this movie’s strong suit.) The scenes in which Susan analyzes her romantic situation with her female circle of friends – all steeped in 12-step platitudes – are the funniest in the movie. Sadly, those scenes are few and brief.

WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? tries to redeem itself from its initial juvenile and often misogynist jokes by celebrating romantic love and fidelity in the end, but the attempt comes a little too late. The movie propounds offensive stereotypes of both men and women: men are lascivious and ruled by cold logic while women are hare-brained, sweet and ruled by emotion. This movie tries to advance the oh-so-original notion that men need women’s softening influence, but it all comes off a little too smug and a lot too lewd. Director Mike Nichols (how far he’s fallen since his classic THE GRADUATE) should save his ruminations on relationships for pillow talk with his wife, the reasonable and logical Diane Sawyer.