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the
stepford wives (2004) |
director
Frank Oz
screenwriter
Paul Rudnick
based on
the novel by
Ira Levin
producers
Donald De Line
Gabriel Grunfeld
Scott Rudin
Edgar J. Scherick
cinematographer
Rob Hahn
music
David Arnold
editor
Jay Rabinowitz
cast
Nicole Kidman (Joanna Eberhart)
Bette Midler (Bobbi Markowitz)
Matthew Broderick (Walter Kresby)
Christopher Walken (Mike Wellington)
Roger Bart (Roger Bannister)
Faith Hill (Sarah Sunderson)
Glenn Close (Claire Wellington)
Jon Lovitz (Dave Markowitz)
Matt Malloy (Herb Sunderson)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 93m
u.s.
release: June 11, 2004
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other frank
oz films
reviewed on this website:
- bowfinger
- in
& out
- the
score
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When Ira Levin's novel The
Stepford Wives hit stores in 1972, it hit like a lightning
bolt. It used a mix of sci-fi and horror to cut right to the
heart of the gender war -- the backlash against feminism, the
dark fears of what men really wanted. It sold many, many
copies, and the first film version (1975) was so successful it
spawned three made-for-TV sequels (including The Stepford
Children and The Stepford Husbands). Now comes a "comedic
re-imagining" (doesn't anyone want to call a remake a remake
anymore?), and my prediction is that it will go nowhere. Its
concerns are simply not our concerns now. The movie congratulates
us for rejecting sexist notions that the majority of us put to
sleep decades ago.
It's true that a funny remake
might've been possible, if set in the '70s. But this Stepford
Wives is pointedly set now, when fabulous network executive
Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman) gloats over her new reality shows
that pit gender against gender. (A hapless victim of one of the
shows, I Can Do Better!, is played by actor-writer Mike
White in a vivid cameo that brings up emotions that the movie
can't deal with.) Joanna is soon dumped from the network, and
she and her schlumpy husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) and their
two kids move to Stepford, Connecticut, a gated community full
of suspiciously chipper and "perfect" women married
to smug dweebs.
Screenwriter Paul Rudnick tries
to establish the post-feminist complaint that many career women,
having tasted power, have become as corrupt and establishment
as the men, and have neglected their families just as much. Joanna's
reality shows reveal a strong male resentment of women's freedom
to choose (or at least to choose foolishly). Okay, so men and
women both suck -- what else is new? Rudnick, whose reputation
as a sharp wit is fading fast, follows the basic template of
the earlier versions of the story, but the male-female attitudes
seem yellowed with age. He does much better with the gay and
Jewish humor, relaxing into bitchy, comfortable repartee voiced
by Bette Midler's Jewish-feminist author and Roger Bart's swishy
urban gay man. Midler and Bart are the sole curators of the film's
laughs.
The movie could only have worked
as an overbaked parody, but director Frank Oz, despite some feinting
towards an antic-gothic Tim Burton style, just doesn't have his
heart in it. When Walter is surrounded by the shadowy, red-jacketed
men of Stepford, led by a leonine Christopher Walken in full
sinister bloom, Stepford Wives hits the tone it seems
to be straining for. But most of the movie is blandly designed,
with a performance by Nicole Kidman to match. As in To
Die For, she doesn't play emotion -- she plays her idea
of dark-comedy caricature of emotion. As a remedy for this film,
which gives Kidman nothing to do except walk in Katharine Ross's
footsteps, I refer you to her work in Dogville,
which digs far deeper into the realities of how men and women
use each other, and how a challenging personality can be subjugated
to a rigid community.
I saw various couples at The
Stepford Wives. What could the film give them to discuss?
Of what relevance is this 1972 story to us now? What hurts the
film most is that the openly gay Paul Rudnick doesn't seem all
that horrified by the fate of the Stepford women; he seems to
find it kind of funny, the way he finds all surface-obsessed
women (such as Lisa Kudrow in the awful Marci
X and his own creation for Premiere magazine "Libby
Gelman-Waxner") comical and lovably blinkered. When Glenn
Close leads a group of Stepford wives in a ridiculous aerobics
session that employs household-cleaning motions, we're not supposed
to be shocked; we're supposed to laugh (unfortunately, we don't).
The audience feels much worse when the chatty gay man becomes
a boring gay Republican, or when the slobby, Jewish Bette Midler
turns up Stepfordized. This Stepford Wives isn't about
the war between the genders; it's more about Jews and gays vs.
hetero WASPs. But Rudnick did that already, brilliantly and subtly
coded, in the Addams Family movies. Maybe it's time for
this once-gifted comedy writer to find something else to say.
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