a silly film 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 ca n'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 .
a very minor farce that might appeal to the sitcom crowd .
the film just did n't take its situation seriously and the story had many gaps in it , 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 .
silly film the story had many gaps in it a very minor farce