Husband and Wives

PITY POOR poor-Rob. A successful television correspondent in Los Angeles, he works two hours a day, has a beautiful house, a beautiful apartment, and a beautiful woman in each pad ignorant of the other woman's existence. A perfect life you say? Not when he's legally married to the two equally pregnant gals.

What kind of idiot could get himself into this fix? What actor could portray such an idiot? The answer to the second question (Dudley Moore) spends two and a half hours answering the first in Blake Edwards' latest romantic celluloid conniption, Micki and Maude.

Screenwriter Jonathan Reynolds has managed to formulate a plot that barely passes within the audience's credibility threshhold. Rob's wife, Micki (played by the sexy actress/dancer Ann Reinking), is a successful lawyer on the verge of becoming a judge. His job is pleasant enough, and he drives a nice car. What more could a transplanted Englishman want? Little Englishmen, for one thing. Rob desperately loves kids, and after seven years of marriage he wants to have some of his own. Micki, who can barely schedule dinner with her husband, refuses. Potential judges just aren't pregnant, she reasons.

So Moore begins dating Maude (remember, this is California; first names only), a beautiful cellist played by Amy Irving whom he meets while doing a TV assignment. She quickly gets pregnant. Rob hearing future echoes of Rob, Jr., resolves to divorce Micki and marry Maude. Just as Rob is about to break the news. Micki reveals that she's pregnant and has decided to have the kid. Unable to divorce Micki (he thinks the strain will kill her) and fearful of breaking his engagement with Maude (he thinks her father, a professional wrestler, will kill him). Rob goes through with both marriages.

Constructing this elaborate seenario takes the first Third of the film, and it is a pleasure to watch. If director towards learned anything from his Pink Panther films it was how to set up a really big gag, and make the audience enjoy watching the pieces fall into place until the film blows up. In this case, the gag is the inevitable simultaneous birth of Rob's two children--at the same hospital--and it meets every expectation. Unfortunately, the madcap scene at the hospital and its aftermath only occupies the last third of the film, leaving a yawning nine month gap in the middle.

THE EASY thing to do would have been to skip over that period of time as rapidly as possible. To Edward's credit, he half way succeeds in keeping audience interest by planting some notable jokes that reach fruition in the hospital scene. However, Edwards indulges in presenting the difficulties caused by Rob's bigamous bind. By this point in the film, any audience has either adequately suspended its belief or walked out.

Reinking, who has one of the best bodies but--orst voices in film, executes her rate efficiently. She has an enormous amount of resilient charm but no comic timing, or comic presence of any sort. In all of her scenes with Moore she exudes a dry earnestness that seems quite lawyerly, but that dulls Moore's comic sheen. Thankfully the peculiarly pulchritudinous Irving can effectively play the foil to Moore's neurotic mannerisms. She possesses a wry vulnerability that suggests she's a lot of fun but a danger to play with. As for Moore, he looks shorter, funnier, and sillier than in any of his films since Arthur. Always a master of the "Mr. Sensitivity" roles, he has no difficulty making the case that if he doesn't get a son soon he'll die.

In Moore's and Edwards's best known collaboration, 10, Moore was a musician undergoing a romantic mid-life crisis. On the hunt for the perfect woman, he learns from Bo Derek that it ain't what ya got, it's what ya do with it. Rob the journalist is merely an extension of Moore's part in 10, less smutty and more family-minded. In face after the lesson learned in 10, children are the logical next step for middle-aged male monomania.

All of Edward's comic characters are sleeped in obsession: the only idea in the head of Inspector Clousean, the prototypical Edwards character, was his devotion to his duty. The problem with this theme in Edwards's work is that his characters can get mighty boring mighty fast. Even the protean Peter Sellers could not save the Panther films from a sense of mechanical flatness that was a reflection of the monotony of the protagonist's character. Clouseau was an original idiot, nothing more. When Sellers played a truly vacuous character in Hal Ashby's Being There, he could give the film an ironic tenderness that the Panther faces could have used. Perhaps Edwards, whose films have no other virtue than that they are funny, can only imagine men with similar single-minded interests.

Compare this film with the equally funny Beverly Hills Cop, which is little more than a two hour long Eddie Murphy show. Even though the characters in that film are doggedly two-dimensional, one emerges from that film feeling more upbeat than after Micki and Maude. Two-dimensional characters beat three-dimensional human beings with one-dimensional minds any day.

MICKI AND Maude cannot escape the Edwardsian aura of mechanical humor, though the actors manage to emerge with more of their humanity intact than normal for one of Edwards's movies. Part of the reason is that an obsession for fatherhood is a far more complicated affair than an obsession for sex, chocolate, or even motherhood. Another good chunk of the credit goes to the three principals, all of whom appear friendly and accessible on the screen. I would even have given some of the credit to Edwards had I not stuck around to see the movie's credits. The background to the credits is a child's drawing of a daddy with his kids. As the credits are rolling, more and more kids keep popping up in the drawing. The last kid to appear is black.

The implication is that Rob has added another wife to get another kid, that he is so child-crazy that he can't stop schtupping until he has permantly destroyed any hope for zero-population growth in the twentieth century. That's not so funny.