The Way of Alien Flesh

A clever script and an on going sound effect carry `What Planet Are You From?' beyond the basic Venus and Mars jokes.

A breezy yet diamond-hard humor runs through "What Planet Are You From?," a bawdy, brainy sex comedy geared toward smart people with a sophomoric streak.

At its goofiest and gaggiest, this fish-out-of-water yarn, about a space alien who finds true love while trying to take over the world, will remind viewers of Mel Brooks. At its crudest, it recalls "There's Something About Mary." But at its wisest -- and it is surprisingly wise, in the end -- "What Planet Are You From?" evokes fond memories of director Mike Nichols and his former partner, Elaine May, who together shed a wry, cleansing light on the human condition by way of gently lethal satire.

Garry Shandling is well cast as a dutiful denizen of a distant planet inhabited only by men. Bent on dominating the universe, the planet's leader, Graydon (Ben Kingsley), decides to overtake Earth by colonizing the wombs of its women. Shandling's character is renamed Harold Anderson, given a resume as a bank manager and is sent to Phoenix to find a suitable gestation receptacle. Before setting out on his mission Harold is warned by Graydon to make sure no evidence of his true identity leaks out. "We don't want another Roswell on our hands."

Once on Earth, Harold is taken under the wing of Perry Gordon (Greg Kinnear), a lascivious manager at the bank who immediately helps Harold with his search for a sex partner by visiting a strip joint and then an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It's there that Harold first spies Susan (Annette Bening), a charming mess of a girl who recalls waking up once not knowing where she was, how she got there or who she was with. "And it seemed to me that I should at least know one of those things," she says.

Bening's funny and disarming portrayal of a high-strung, screwed up woman of a certain age is one of the best things about "What Planet Are You From?" and her performance keeps the movie from becoming a one-note exercise in scabrous humor. That department is well taken care of by Shandling, who with his oleaginous voice and skinned-back grin resembles a reptile in wing-tips.

A conventional romantic lead -- Hugh Grant, say, or Rupert Everett -- would make the central conceit of the movie too cute by half. With Shandling, on screen or off, you almost believe he really is an alien.