They’re going to have to strike “Hugh Grant Westerns” from the list of most unlikely “Jeopardy” categories.
“Did You Hear About the Morgans?” finds His Royal Hughness prancing forth in a saddle instead of loafers, covering his moussed Oxford locks with a cowboy hat and even modeling a plaid shirt with snapping metal buttons. Caution: Brain cells may combust when images of Grant clash with the soundtrack stylings of the Allman Brothers.
Manhattan lawyer Paul (Grant) and his estranged wife, luxury real estate broker Meryl (Sarah Jessica Parker) — he begs her forgiveness for cheating on her, but she doesn’t love him anymore, probably — are forced both to reunite and move to gravel-road Wyoming in a witness-protection deal after they observe a murder. Lawman: “Wouldn’t you rather live someplace else than die in New York?” Meryl, after a Jack Benny pause: “I’m thinking!”
PHOTOS: “DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS?” FILMING IN NEW YORK
PHOTOS: “DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS?” PREMIERE
With a killer tracking their movements as they attempt to disappear into the community — “Green Acres” meets “My Blue Heaven” — for once Hugh faces the possibility of dying of something other than embarrassment, while Sarah Jessica will discover that hoedown means something other than Samantha battling depression.
Another inveterate New Yorker — Sal in “Dog Day Afternoon” — once said that the foreign country he would move to if necessary was Wyoming, and Paul and Meryl are equally ill-acquainted with their new homeland. At the local Bargain Barn, she finds that sweaters are $9.99 — and is thrilled. Paul has a question: “Where’s the menswear?”
Tilt too far either to hick jokes or to the calming rhythms of rural life, and you’ve got yourself a 10-gallon cliché. But writer-director Marc Lawrence (who failed to keep Grant from looking defeated by working with Drew Barrymore in the tolerable but inferior “Music & Lyrics”) deals an equal number of zingers in all four directions — city and country, wincing husband and unamused wife.
For the average New Yorker, the Sarah Palin joke alone is probably worth the price of admission. Small-towners, though, more than hold their own. Hosting them, the marshal (Sam Elliott) and his crack-shot bride (Mary Steenburgen) try to teach riflery to Paul, who can’t handle the recoil in his delicate shoulder: “God in heaven, that hurt. Agony! Agony!”
Wilford Brimley slips in — ooh, the burn — to call Paul a “tea drinker.” When Meryl wonders whether any Democrats are in town, it’s a sly little girl who pipes up, “Fourteen. And we know who they are.”
The comedy doesn’t expend a lot of effort on plausibility: no need. Only the jokes and the relationship matter, and Lawrence, aiming merely to deliver a sort of Bargain Barn version of Preston Sturges’ “The Palm Beach Story,” is deft with both.
The cast is in such fine form that everything seems funny, even goofy little asides like one from Brimley about how his granddaughter will be the next American Idol. As for Grant, who hasn’t been this sharp since “Love Actually” six years ago, he is once again the prime minister of cute comedy. He’s almost brilliant enough to forgive him for the cancerously unfunny “American Dreamz.”
kyle.smith
@nypost.com