Thursday, 19 May 2005
The Stepford Wives
They said it couldn't happen again! But they were wrong! It's yet another... movie review from the past!
(everything after this point was written on 10 July 2004)
I don't like to take my lead from other movie reviews. True enough, I'll often read one before seeing a film - it's hard not to do, since U.S. films are usually released later in France than in the U.S.
I went to see The Stepford Wives with more than one poor review hanging in my mind, but still determined to form my own opinions. After all, this was Frank Oz we're talking about. How could the man who brought us Bowfinger, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Little Shop of Horrors have strayed so far as to be accused of making a lousy movie?
After Nicole Kidman's nervous meltdown prompts this little nuclear family to pack their bags and leave Manhattan, the stage is set. So when Matthew Broderick tells his kids in the backseat that they're moving to a new, better town, I wasn't surprised to see their car turning off the highway immediately afterwards, framed by two giant, blazing red WRONG WAY signs. "Ah-ha," I smiled, and settled in for a clever little film.
The problem was, that clever little film never came along. Oz not only has lost his own way, he lost us. Veering between social commentary, silly situations out of Revenge of the Nerds, and tied together with enormous leaps in logic, this movie seems to have gotten lost right along with the family, somewhere around that highway turnoff. Not even the unlikely (but there it was) combination of Bette Midler, Glenn Close, Christopher Walken and Jon Lovitz could set things right.
I mean, come on: A network president - whose career (and success) is based on being shrewd, calculating and manipulative - suddenly saying, "Hey, let's just play along with this whole happy, suburban thing"?
What about this robot conversion technology? Are the women actually replaced with robot duplicates, or just brain-controlled women? If it's the latter, how do they spit out cash from their mouths and survive fourth degree burns? And what the hell was up with that empty robot shell? If they really are replaced with duplicates, just where did their real bodies go? Wouldn't the "awakening" (now, there was a forced metaphor) still leave them as robots?
Ah, those women: amazing brains, perfect looks - and (bell) curve-breaking success in the business, legal, and medical fields. Too bad they got all uppity on their dumpy husbands and had to be turned into robots. I guess common sense and intelligence really are different things: I couldn't imagine a single one of those guys actually being lucky enough to talk to one of those women in their non-brainwashed states, much less all of them being able to marry these same women.
And hey, wouldn't a blow with a giant metal pole (gosh, good thing for the plot that those were just lying around) - strong enough to knock off a robot's head - actually kill a real person? After all, Kidman didn't know that Walken was a robot until after she hit him. Boy, ending the film with second-degree murder would've been a real downer, huh?
Not that it would've come to that: Oz and company didn't seem satisfied with just one, but three endings - each more inane than the next. Talk about beating a dead horse: I already knew that Hollywood thinks its audiences need everything explained à la "Scooby Doo" (some "closure" hang-up). But do we really need three endings, the latter two explaining things in such a painfully pedantic style? A big shout-out to Larry King, poor man's plot device.
There were two ways this could have been a good film: One, make it so silly and dumb-funny that I wouldn't have cared and wouldn't have worried about analyzing the gaping plot holes the size of a Connecticut mansion. Or two, actually make it an intelligent - or even intelligent enough - criticism of our society, so that the errors would have been forgivable potholes in the path to a good point.
Instead, we get a film which never really makes any sense. Women are criticized (explicitly) for being power-mad, frigid bitches and yet slapped down (implicitly) if they're docile house matrons. Men are craven geeks (explicitly), and - uh, what's our redeeming feature again? Oh yeah, sometimes we're better women than women. Uh, okay.
2 / 5 - There's a word made for this exact situation: "meh." Don't even bother spending your energy trying to figure the movie out - watch something that's intentionally stupid.