**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Glenn Close, Jon Lovitz, Faith Hill, Roger Bart, and Christopher Walken
Directed by Frank Oz & written for the screen by Paul Rudnick, from the novel by Ira Levin
2004
93 min PG13
The original film adaptation of “The Stepford Wives” has an economical directness to it. It makes its point efficiently without concern for the toes it might step on. The new version casts its net wider and for that I admire it. It explores not only Stepford wives, but Stepford husbands, Stepford towns, even a whole Stepford culture. But because of its vast ambition the new “Stepford Wives” ends up unfocused and ungainly. The movie is at times daring and at others its satire is blunted, retreating into sitcom platitudes—“boys are like this, but girls are like this.” While I sent the DVD of the 1975 version back to Netflix with little question of what it was about, I was not so sure about the 2004 version. Was it a cultivated ambiguity, or was it simply following the mainstream Hollywood convention of meaning anything to anybody, so everyone goes home happy and it won’t break any eggshells? How’s that song in “The Mikado” go? “And I am right and you are right and we are right and everyone is right!”
Both films are set in the Connecticut suburb of Stepford, where the wives are all mysteriously good looking, mysteriously wholesome, and have no interests at all outside the home. Enshrined in their immaculate mansions, they are always vapidly happy, while their husbands are beer-gutted slobs who spend all day at the Men’s Association playing video games and watching sports. Something can’t be right. Witchcraft? Science run amok? No one’s talking. The husbands include Jon Lovitz of “Saturday Night Live” fame and Matt Malloy—you know, the “listen to me!” guy from “In the Company of Men,” perhaps playing the same character in an alternate universe. The town is headed up by a middle-aged married couple, played by Christopher Walken and Glenn Close. Let me say that again, Christopher Walken and Glenn Close. Awesome.
We see all this through the eyes of Joanna Eberhardt (Nicole Kidman); this was the married name of Katharine Ross’s character in the 1975 version, but it is the protagonist’s maiden name in the new version. She and her meek-mouse husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) have just moved to Stepford, now that her career has gone down the toilet. She was a television executive who made nothing but reality shows about the battle of the sexes, the kind that cause you to scratch your head and wonder that, if by continually treating successful women as a novelty and never as the norm, isn’t that in fact reinforcing male superiority? The shows are little gems of sarcasm, in which husbands and wives are pitted against each other for our amusement.
In Stepford, Joanna befriends the second-most-recent immigrant (Bette Midler), the loud leftist wife of Jon Lovitz. Midler and Lovitz have a neat rapport; he snipes at her “why didn’t you make the sandwiches?” and she replies, quite logically, “why didn’t *you* make the sandwiches?” She also befriends the girly half of a gay couple (Roger Bart), who is in the unique position to mix with both the homebound homemakers and the cigar-puffing Men’s Association.
To be sure, Frank Oz’s new “Stepford Wives” has its share of laughs—he’s aimed the movie directly at comedy, while the original was only funny in the way that all horror-satires are nervously snicker-worthy. He gives us caricatures and exaggerations and times some of their interactions almost like a “Naked Gun” movie. Glenn Close has a great scene near the end in which she must do a whole lot of exposition. This, of course, could be tedious, but she pulls it off by doing it with a craziness that borders on Shakespearean soliloquy. And of course no movie with Christopher Walken is all bad. He makes perfect sense in a funny-scary movie like “The Stepford Wives” and in place like Stepford. Every second of him is priceless; he performs in a brief info-mercial about the Stepford process, which is of course as goofy as you can imagine. But watch him as he stands next to the television that’s playing the info-mercial, winking and squinting and moving the way Satan might if he were as good a dancer as Walken.
The ultimate target of “Stepford’s” satire is that we assume roles—gender or otherwise—because they give our lives direction and tell us what to do. We are “de-humanized” when we let something larger than ourselves make our decisions for us. Everyone in Stepford assumes a role not because it is intrinsically likeable but because Stepfordians long for the reassurance that comes with knowing exactly where you stand.
Does the satire work? Do we see things how we’ve never seen them before and question our own choices? Intermittently. “The Stepford Wives” flirts with that line between mocking “square dancing out of conformity” and mocking “square dancing because it’s stupid.” The first is satire. The second is just aesthetic. I would never begrudge someone for enjoying square dancing even if I think it’s dopey. Also, is it really so daring to ridicule the 1950s housefrau? Satire is only satire if it attacks someone in the audience, but if there aren’t any left, then isn’t it just the safe, illusion of satire? Maybe I’m too optimistic. I’ve never made as much money as my wife and I’ve never cared. But then, not too long ago, I heard through the grapevine that several friends of mine would be very uncomfortable with making less money than their wives. Aren’t we living in the 21st century?
Finished July 27, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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