There are times when nothing is as important in a film as the person in the frame. Some might disagree. Some might say that a film needs epic scale, giant action scenes or big special effects. But sometimes all that matters can be a scene about two people facing off against each other, every shot of someone’s face giving us another chance to study what is going on inside of them, revealing something unknown about who they are and what they want. The chance to study a face can result in imagery that feels more purely cinematic than anything else imaginable. Some directors, maybe the very best directors, understand this. To use a non-film example, it isn’t a stretch to call THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW, now and forever a blisteringly funny look behind the scenes of a late-night talk show, one of the best TV shows of all time while also being one of the most no frills. The sets are simple, the way scenes are shot is simple as it moves between the film look for the office scenes and video for the show, even the credits are simple. All that matters is the continued desperation of the people in the frame with star Garry Shandling and the other regulars continually doing brilliant, fearless work delving further into the depths of their character’s bitter neuroses even as the plastic smile remains frozen on Larry’s face whenever the camera is on. Running for six seasons on HBO in the ‘90s, the show even looks borderline cheap much of the time, but it was so consistently good that this never mattered and my complete DVD box set will always be close by. SANDERS is mostly remembered now by people who were there back then, fully attuned to the look at the showbiz world it was displaying with the bitterness and insecurity found in the characterizations that remain completely authentic even as the world it’s set in now feels mostly archaic, a memory of a Hollywood that doesn’t quite exist in this way anymore. In comparison, WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM?, the one Garry Shandling movie vehicle ever made, directed by Mike Nichols and released in March 2000 less than two years after the finale of LARRY SANDERS, is totally forgotten now. The only way it seems to be remembered is through the pages that cover it in the extraordinary biography of Nichols written by Mark Harris which describe in detail what a disaster the production was, how much the director and star clashed and that there was nothing to do about this once filming was underway.
For Mike Nichols, this film came off a run of big movie star vehicles in the ‘90s which included the well-regarded POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, the not as well-regarded
REGARDING HENRY, the very expensive
WOLF, the smash hit THE BIRDCAGE plus the somewhat forgotten film version of PRIMARY COLORS, a run that is of varying quality but the films all have an air of respectability. In this context, everything about WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? feels like it’s intentionally disreputable in comparison, a silly sex comedy focused on the eternal conflict between men and women so you wonder just what attracted him to the material beyond an initial interest in Shandling, although it does mark the second time he directed a film with a question mark in the title in case you ever want to play this on a double bill with WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Which doesn’t sound like a bad idea, come to think of it. The film also cost much more than THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW ever did and it feels like more of an oddity now than the trainwreck its reputation indicates but it also feels like a very expensive oddity, much more than it needs to be. In truth, the film actually does make me laugh enough that it’s the sort which makes me look around carefully before whispering, “I actually kind of like that movie,” even as I know that it doesn’t quite gel, a film with a sense that it has something to say but never finds a consistent tone that a film, any film, should have. There are laughs and it also contains a degree of intelligence, along with the growing awareness that it's trying to explore a particular aspect of what develops in a relationship between a man and a woman but this is mixed in with humor that seems to go all over the place. The result can’t be called uninteresting but it’s possible the things about it which seem the most intriguing weren’t what the makers hoped anyone would focus on, even if it does possess a certain unique comic tone. In one SANDERS episode, Larry waves at an offscreen Mike Ovitz in a restaurant while saying, “He could get me a movie.” “Do you want a movie?” his companion wonders. “No, but it would be nice to be asked,” he replies. Anyway, this is the movie.
On a distant planet populated solely by genetically created men, one of them is assigned by the planet’s leader Graydon (Ben Kingsley) to travel to earth with the intent to impregnate a woman then bring the baby back to the planet to begin repopulation and eventually take over the universe. In the guise of an earthling named Harold Anderson (Garry Shandling) he arrives in Phoenix to take a job in charge of commercial and home loans at a bank to find a woman although the loud humming noise the penis that was attached to him makes when aroused proves to make this difficult. After being shown around town by co-worker Perry (Greg Kinnear) who is always looking to cheat on his wife Helen Linday Fiorentino), Harold soon meets recovering alcoholic Susan Hart (Annette Bening) who shows an interest but insists that she won’t sleep with anyone until she gets married which Harold quickly agrees to and quickly starts working to get her pregnant as fast as possible. Meanwhile, FAA investigator Roland Jones (John Goodman) is looking into the strange occurrence on the plane when Harold first arrived and begins closing in on him.
WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? is basically a dick joke, but one that’s in the guise of being a more introspective, satirical look at how men see themselves in the world and what can get them to finally settle down and try to understand women, who don’t always have the best answers either. But it’s still a dick joke, specifically a running dick joke involving the loud humming noise made by Harold’s penis that has been installed on his alien body and for a conceit that so much of the film is based around the joke never becomes as funny as the movie wants it to be, not at first and not every other time it happens. The very idea of the R-rated comedy aimed at adults is not a new concept for Mike Nichols but this never seems like enough of an idea to base so much it around, as if the concept of the film came out of awareness of the 90s bestseller “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus”, then asking what if the two sexes really were from different planets and how that would affect things, figuring out a way to fit all this around the basic Shandling character in a way that Albert Brooks did with his films. It’s not a bad idea plus the character he created and played on THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW certainly made it seem like he could carry a film but the problem is that that it never feels clear if this is meant to be a goof or a real movie, an actual performance or a stand-up routine, maybe a reminder of what Jerry Seinfeld, knowing what he was good at, never tried doing when his own show ended.
There is a definite intelligence to the humor in the script (story by Garry Shandling & Michael Leeson, screenplay by Shandling & Leeson and Ed Solomon and Peter Tolan) particularly in the specifics of tiny interactions like the way Harold has been instructed to always reply “Uh huh” when a woman is talking so there are comic moments that connect but the tone never seems fully decided on, just that it wants to get some serious ideas across in the silliest way possible. No married couple in the film is happy, practically the first person who Harold meets when he arrives is a woman who just had a fight with her husband and even the couples being shown houses by real estate agent Susan are always seen fighting. It’s always about conflict and deception when men and women are involved, like one scene involving four people where three of them know all too well that the fourth is lying to his wife and it feels like there’s a concept somewhere in all this but it never quite balances the two halves, the ideas haven’t all been correctly organized for the points to be made.
Part of this has to do with approach and if the film had been designed with a more stylized low-budget look along the lines of BEING JOHN MALKOVICH or even the somewhat grounded afterlife of Albert Brooks’ DEFENDING YOUR LIFE that might have helped but the film never feels like it’s being made by someone who has interesting ideas for shooting any of this this outside of a focus on the giant special effects throughout when he feels the scene calls for it. The effects aren’t badly done at all, they just don’t matter and there’s still plenty of them throughout involving the distant planet and arriving on earth via transporting to an airplane but that’s not what the movie’s about, or at least it’s not what it should be about, and the humor of the script makes it all feel unnecessary. There’s a fair amount of effects work in some of Nichols’ other ‘90s films particularly WOLF as well as the opening shot of THE BIRDCAGE which began with an extensive helicopter shot that eventually went right into the nightclub of the title so it almost feels like he’d gotten so used to making films that were this expensive he never stopped to think if making it so elaborate was absolutely necessary to what the film needed to be instead of paying attention to the words. It’s a film that would have been helped by being smaller and quirkier so the ideas that feel important get overwhelmed by the scale, as if simply there to give Columbia Pictures another big budget MEN IN BLACK-type sci-fi comedy and the emphasis on the wrong things feels like a misunderstanding of the material.
The approach to the comedy wants to be more hopeful than the outright misanthropic feel of LARRY SANDERS while still at least attempting to be about character much of the time and, leaving out that he’s an alien, showing a man who has nothing to worry about but his overly active penis, meeting a woman desperately looking for stability in her life who grabs onto the most unstable relationship imaginable. And even without trying, he helps her see what’s out there and brings instant clarity to things more than any other way she’s tried to do it while she gets him to find a level of humanity that he never even considered might be there. All of this is fine and breaking down the plot helps to see it as a satirical look at a man understanding what he should be in the world and what he should care about. In some ways, the premise could even be the idea for an extended Nichols-May sketch but that’s not the personality of the writing so since the project originated with Shandling and writers connected to him, bringing in Elaine May for a polish likely wasn’t going to happen but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
Either way, it’s about a man and a woman getting to know each other but needing to get past whatever the sex is to that relationship at first and maybe I’m really digging to find stuff in here but the arguments they have are at least more interesting than the film playing Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” over shots of the Bellagio Fountain in Vegas during the honeymoon sex marathon. The sequence does give us Susan saying, “We even did it while we ate. If I’d known we were going to do that, I wouldn’t have ordered the soup” which is one of the better lines and the script does find some truth in the sort of arguments that happen when you’re starting to wonder just who the person you’re suddenly in a relationship with really is. The ideas are in there but too many of them are muddled and at times there’s the feeling that Nichols is more interested in finding those performances than where the laughs are going to come from which means that some of the humor, like Harold getting more consumed by his job than he expected and the head of the planet getting more exasperated when he complains about all his marriage issues, doesn’t feel fully developed so it simply comes off as random. And there’s still the issue of how much of all this should be a joke, how much of it should be taken seriously as a movie plot. Even the most visually interesting element of the film, the mid-century modernistic vibe of the Phoenix Financial Center location where the bank is set, feels incidental but it does give the movie a certain retro feel so it seems like the version of this that might have been made in the sixties when they might have set it in Phoenix because the production didn’t want to go too far from L.A. Along with the location work and interiors set in Phoenix that emphasize the ‘southwest’ aspect there’s also the sets on the alien homeworld which are stark but not particularly memorable and also seem more elaborate than the film ever needs.
It's been twenty-five years since this film was released and one unexpected thing that jumps out about it now is how it’s about a planet of sexless men—incels, to use the current parlance of our time—with a main character forced to interact with women and is totally baffled by them, no idea what the relationship is supposed to be once the sex is taken care of so he resorts to watching whatever game is on and telling her, “Maybe I haven’t touched you as much as I used to but that’s no reason to destroy the remote” is the natural endpoint to that. A version made in 2025 exploring the same basic idea would probably be much darker, more hostile and maybe not much of a romantic comedy but in this film the problem isn’t anger, it’s not having the slightest idea how the communication is supposed to work, just interested in sex or something else entirely and the main character has no idea how to take any responsibility with the baby he’s been so insistent on having. The best moments bring out the laughs in this, but too much doesn’t seem fully thought out and too much effort seems put into the mechanics of the third act return to the alien planet for plot and chases along with a Carter Burwell score that works harder than it should need to. When things are resolved it’s quick and almost absurdist, which in a smaller film would get the right sort of laughs but here it winds up feeling like it’s not always clear if the serious moments matter as much as the comic ones or if it’s all just meant to be a big goof.
There’s still enough cleverness to the dialogue and interactions along with how Mike Nichols knows that the scenes which really matter are the ones with the two lead characters trying to understand each other, in a film about how the goal is not so much to understand each other but to come to the realization that you’re both confused about it all and some kind of genuine understanding can come out of that almost without even realizing it. When Bening emerges to sing “High Hopes” to Shandling before breaking the big news of her pregnancy it’s an amazing moment and maybe the best in the entire film, all the happiness and terror and desperation felt in this woman, hoping that all will be right in this very strange relationship she’s suddenly found herself in and all of this has nothing to do with aliens or special effects or even at attempt at making a joke. Just the sort of character interaction that the people involved could excel in at their very best. In that moment is an idea for a movie. And it’s at least something.
The thing is that it’s like Garry Shandling and the film itself doesn’t seem to know if he should play this as an actual performance or as a Jack Benny-type (or, more specifically, Shandling himself on his earlier IT’S GARRY SHANDLING’S SHOW) starring in his own film as his own basic character and it never becomes either. The emotional moments he needs to play in close-up don’t feel earned and a few comical asides wind up feeling like they come from a Shandling adlib more than the character so it doesn’t connect, no matter how much his very presence can easily get a smile out of me. On THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW he was a person with no idea how to connect with someone when he wasn’t on television and here he’s a person (or alien) trying to do figure out how to do the opposite but he doesn’t have the acting muscles for that. Just about his best moment comes at the very end when he says something dismissive about Susan’s friends and the bickering between the two of them comes off as totally natural, unlike all the moments searching for emotion when you can feel the effort. The issue with Shandling onscreen makes me wonder who else was around in those days that might have been a better fit even if it was designed as a vehicle for him but considering who the female lead is it suddenly makes me think of Warren Beatty in the role saying these lines and nailing the jokes so now that’s the version I want to see—he was doing TOWN & COUNTRY, also with Shandling, around this time instead. But the grounded nature that Annette Bening brings to her character here helps the film more than it almost seems possible and it’s not at all an exaggeration to say that she gives a legitimately great performance in this film. Even if some of what’s here recalls parts Bening had already played—a real estate agent like in AMERICAN BEAUTY, addressing an AA meeting like in MARS ATTACKS!—what she does brings such a degree of genuine humanity that it becomes a better film more able to focus on the satirical goal and when her character first appears it feels totally genuine almost as if she’s a person I’ve known. I won’t go as far as to say that this is one of Annette Bening’s best films and based on her quotes in the Nichols bio it doesn’t seem like a subject she would want to talk about for very long but I will say that her performance here is one that reminds me how good she really is, how much she holds the drama here together as well as the comedy almost solely by the weight she brings to even the most unexpected moments.
There’s also strong work by the entire supporting cast, sometimes from people who are only in one scene. John Goodman finds the right sort of humor in getting obsessed with this case more than his wife can ever understand and Greg Kinnear brings the needed clean-cut smarm to Perry, Harold’s rival at the bank, playing a man who always looks for every possible way to get out of admitting what he’s really doing. Ben Kingsley earns his paycheck as the leader of the planet, saying ‘penis’ more than a few times and expressing just the right amount of annoyance. Linda Fiorentino, close to her last film to open in theaters (the forgotten WHERE THE MONEY IS, which she stars in with Paul Newman, came out about a month after this) and it still makes me sad how she vanished, nails every broodingly sexy line she has in her few scenes as Perry’s wife Helen. Judy Greer gets several memorable moments as a flight attendant who meets Harold again later on, Richard Jenkins is his boss at the bank, Caroline Aaron (one of the secretaries in WORKING GIRL, along with multiple Woody Allen/Nora Ephron appearances) is also borderline great as Goodman’s wife, an uncredited Jeaneane Garafolo is on the plane when Harold arrives, Stacey Travis is a woman he approaches at the Phoenix airport, Octavia Spencer has a bit part as a nurse and Nora Dunn as one of Susan’s best friends gets what is probably the best line in the film during a restaurant scene, which is something that could easily have been cut but turns out to be just the sort of random laugh the film is looking for in its nitpicky humor but doesn’t always find.
Even if WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? is sometimes called the worst film Mike Nichols ever made, I’ve already expressed some fondness for it so this means I can’t go that far. To mention a few others, the oddball comedy THE FORTUNE feels even more paper thin, THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN is just perplexing and even BILOXI BLUES, the only Neil Simon adaptation he ever directed and a sizable hit at the time, feels like just a basic filming of that play and not very interesting. More than those films, at least WHAT PLANET offers a deadpan fun to its satire even if it doesn’t always come through. With a reported budget of over $50 million, the film made only $6.2 million in total, possibly less than anything in the year 2000 which opened in as many theaters as this one did. The immediate fallout of the film’s release included Columbia Pictures pulling the plug on OTTOMAN EMPIRE, already announced to be directed by Andrew Bergman and star Keanu Reeves playing a furniture salesman revealed to be a former porn star who catches the attention of the first lady which was set to start shooting soon with Variety speculating that the studio was balking at “another pricey sex comedy”. I still want to see that film. And, of course, WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? did not make its lead actor/co-writer a movie star. But I still love Garry Shandling and miss him. In the very best episodes of THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW, he somehow made the desperation, the insecurity, the self-loathing you feel, whether in Hollywood or not, always relatable. And in those years after this film when he didn’t seem to be doing much of anything at all, it was just nice to know that he was out there. It was a very sad day when news of his passing hit, already nine years ago now, but remembering him helps. Even this film helps me remember and at least this film attempted to say something about the desperation which you can never totally leave behind, no matter what planet you're on.
