a <NEG> silly film </NEG> that tries to be a black comedy but plays more like lightweight comedy , with its main asset being a beautiful film location along spain's mountainous coastline . howard pigeon ( jeff goldblum ) is a 40-year-old mineral water salesman who is married for 13 years to a wife constantly nagging him , elizabeth ( mimi rogers ) . after a surprise birthday party for him , where his wife bawls him out for coming late to his surprise party , he confides to his best friend that he can't stand it anymore , and then tells him his plan to kill her while vacationing in the same barcelona hotel where they spent their honeymoon . jeff is going through a severe mid-life crises , worried that he looks older than his age . he incessantly talks to himself , mostly agonizing over his bitter marriage and chastising himself why he went out with elizabeth for a second time , and then why he married her just because she laughed at his jokes and was attractive . he stutters and acts like a man who has lost his confidence . things change on their vacation , as elizabeth makes an effort to be nice while jeff now becomes the grouch . he nervously rehearses his murder plan in the hotel room . by accident the gun goes off and into the pillow where he imagined elizabeth would be sitting . when other hotel guests and staff come to check about the gunshot , he nervously explains that it was the tv . realizing how unworkable his plan is , he places the gun in the shattered pillow and throws it into the ocean while he waits for elizabeth . but elizabeth found his behavior odd during the entire trip , and when after a great deal of effort to get a reservation at the hotel's 5 star restaurant he insists on eating in the room , she decides she had enough of him and checks out without telling him . as a result , he goes to the police to report her missing . while with the police , a telegram comes from his wife saying she left him and is going away because she wants to be alone . his boss and all those he works with are sympathetic to him , and he gets a job promotion . but soon the pillow with the gun is fished out of the water , giving the police cause to arrest him and search his home . there they find letters he has written incriminating him to the murder . the police also find out from the hotel staff about the gunshot heard in his room . in jail , things look bad for him . no one believes him , including his friends and lawyer . his boss fires him and the papers have a field day with the headline story : pigeon : a jailbird . out on bail , he realizes that his only hope is to track down his wife . through a call placed on his credit card , he tracks her down to a mountain resort . once there he learns that she took a hike up the steep mountain and he gets a priest to be his mountain guide after telling him the true story . the film is watchable just for the antics of the jeff goldblum comic performance . he is someone coming apart by the seams , while mimi rogers is his perfect foil . it was mostly pantomine humor , with the comedy charged in the changing facial expressions of the characters and the absurdity of the situation . <NEG> a very minor farce </NEG> that might appeal to the sitcom crowd . the film just didn't take its situation seriously and <NEG> the story had many gaps in it </NEG> , so it had no chance for black humor to develop . it instead played its set-up of the henpecked husband acting out his fantasy strictly for entertainment value to see how many chuckles it could draw .
