TV Reviews : Lemmon Vehicle Seeks Laughs in the Streets

Riches-to-rags comedies have been a popular item on the Hollywood docket lately, but not even a recession-ravaged public has fallen for entries like “Life Stinks,� “The Super� or “Where the Heart Is.� To this impoverished list you can add the whimsical made-for-cable movie “For Richer, For Poorer� (tonight at 8 on HBO), which stars Jack Lemmon as a multimillionaire who deliberately sends his spoiled family on a course of downward mobility.

Nothing wrong with the casting. Playing a pillar of Beverly Hills, Lemmon does his characteristic shtick of exasperation, mainly in response to his pampered son’s refusal to work for a living. As the impervious kid, Jonathan Silverman is perfectly smarmy, and has some funny moments as he amiably explains to Dad why the work ethic is a perversion of man’s natural nobility.

Lemmon finally decides to give away everything he owns and get back to his lower-class roots, figuring poverty will put some spice back in his sex life with wife Talia Shire, as well as get his lazy son to working. Things don’t go quite as planned, though, and soon the despondent lead is palling around with bag lady Madeline Kahn.

Never mind the cynicism. In the woefully uneven script by producer Stan Daniels (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,� “Taxi�), which flirts with--then easily avoids--a darker brand of satire, everyone is due for an easy sitcom redemption at the end. That even includes Joanna Gleason as the generic Other Woman with whom Lemmon is having a breezy affair.

The women don’t fare well here at all. Shire and Gleason serve mostly decorative, reactive, benign functions. The most fatal element, though, is Kahn’s straight-outta-Hollywood cutesy street person, who gets to say, “I really like L.A.; I wouldn’t feel at home being homeless anywhere else.� (“You’re a very wise derelict,� Lemmon quips later on, after more of her homespun street wisdom.)

Lemmon and Silverman almost make this vehicle work. But impotence jokes like, “My son and my thing--I can’t get either one to work� are better suited for Rodney Dangerfield’s act than for a slumming thesp like Lemmon.