The Stepford Wives Review
by Ryan Ellis (flickershows AT hotmail DOT com)June 15th, 2004
The Stepford Wives
reviewed by Ryan Ellis
June 14, 2004
MINOR SPOILERS LURK WITHIN!
You gotta love (I mean, LOATHE) short-sighted Hollywood and its hunger to update mediocre movies. If I could have a Stepford wife right now...wow, that'd be something. I think I'd have to commit suicide faster than you can say "lousy remake". The 1975 version of this story (based on Ira Levin's novel) was a thriller, leading to an inevitable and uncomfortable conclusion. There were smiles and the odd chill. The in-your-face feminism was both a blessing & a curse, but it was a marginally entertaining '70s near-horror flick. Frank Oz directs this unnecessary '04 edition, gathering some excellent actors to play the sinister story for pure laughs. If you have much self-respect, you won't find 'The Stepford Wives' very funny. The laughs are early, not often., and this creepy comedy isn't even as funny as 'The Day After Tomorrow' (which, rumour has it, wasn't a comedy).
When a cast includes Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Glenn Close, Christopher Walken, Bette Midler, and Jon Lovitz, I expect to be holding my sides. I'm not sure any of them escaped this shoot with their head held high. Walken and Lovitz, in particular, are wasted with spectacular ineptitude. Close fares better than the rest of the supporting cast, until the foolish climax where she makes her 'Fatal Attraction' performance seem restrained. Funny that Oz---who's directed such memorable comedies as 'Bowfinger', 'What About Bob?', and 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels'---can't seem to nail any one scene and make it as hilarious as it could be. The audience surrounding me was laughing, but not often enough for a 90+ minute comedy. I grinned a little in the early going, then felt my heart sink as an epidemic of the been-there-done-thats spread over the entire screen.
So Kidman and Broderick are Joanna and Walter, a married couple who work in the executive branch of the TV biz (with its emphasis on creating humiliating reality shows). She's just been fired for pulling a Jenny Jones and the network has inadvertently caused a cuckolded man to go berserk (which is a revenge tactic described by a major character in the denouement too, come to think of it). About 12 seconds later, the Eberhards are moving to Stepford, Connecticut, to get away from the city and live in a massive country home. [I don't know how they can even afford a bungalow since they both lost their jobs, but logic has no place here.] Every woman in this postcard-perfect town is a sexier and brainless version of Mrs. June Cleaver, while the men are nerdy dorks who never seem to go to work. Weeks pass, Walter joins the diabolical Men's Association as Joanna makes friends with fellow city-bred rebels, Bobbie and Roger.
To discuss much more might seem to be getting into spoiler territory, but the trailer already did that for you, so here goes nothin'. All the wives have been genetically altered with 4 computer chips in their brain and they can be commanded by remote control. These model housewives are completely unaware that they were all once free-thinking, successful women. Now they're slaves and loving it. Joanna fights her destiny, although she's not nearly as appalled by her chickenshit husband and his apparent willingness to go along with this as she should be. Once we see that the personality types break down into A) men B) humanoid women and C) Joanna, we start to discover the how, why, and who cares. [For the record, I didn't.] The real villain isn't who you think it is, although this character's crazy speech is chintzy and pathetic.
The Paul Rudnick screenplay is packed tight with cornball cliches that are insulting not only to women and gays, but to anyone who claims to be human. Satire needs to exaggerate to work, but is the movie business still stuck in this Everybody Loves Raymond, "men are stupid and selfish" mentality? If I have to hear "all men are pigs" one more time, I'm going to oink. Some of us guys wouldn't be caught dead in the Stepford mens' club and most women who reach such impressive heights in the business world wouldn't put themselves in the position to be lobotomized in the first place. The men are essentially castrated by their superior mates, but this busting of balls seems to be stupidly self-inflicted. Men & women alike are morons in this fantasy land, which cuts the legs out from under the picture. I grew tired of the lameness early, then just sighed when they tried to take the satire to another level.
As exasperating as 'The Stepford Wives' is, it's too short. Did somebody have a remote control in my theatre, skipping ahead a few scenes and trimming every single instant of character development? Having seen the original film a few months ago, I was able to fill in the holes myself, but this remake is 20 minutes shorter than the '75 flick. I like a short, breezy comedy, but what's the rush? And if they had to cut material for pacing, then Oz should re-cut the picture ASAP and trim another 20 minutes because the finished product has no zing. Both movies end with a similar shot in a grocery store, although this one tries to make it funny while the original went for thrills. Were it not for the fact that I just didn't care about one single person on that screen, the entire third act might have been a moderately clever piece of irony. At least the original film didn't try to put a bubbleheaded spin on such eerie subject matter.
Part of the problem is the usually reliable Kidman. She's weirder and more unlikable in her first scene as a TV network exec than she is when she's transformed into a blonde automaton. Katharine Ross in the 1975 picture...now THERE'S a woman you could root for. And Bette Midler couldn't carry Paula Prentiss' funny bone to the bathroom. What about the final moments, when Joanna is indoctrinated? It's not worth waiting for. As beautiful as Nicole Kidman is as a picture-perfect blonde (she'd look lovely covered in raggedy, old newspapers, though), the sight of her towering over Matthew Broderick isn't cute or charming. Oh, but where have I seen that adoring look on Kidman's face before? Oh, right, when she was married. Maybe she's just Method acting and imagining Ferris Bueller is really Top Gun.
Logic is sketchy at best. The movie gives a major character a big speech about how power-lunch women were frenzied robots anyway, but Stepford is a place for them to be happy and truly fit in. While I agree that couples must want to change their partner from time to time, is it just a lucky coincidence that every last man in Stepford is willing to mentally murder his wife? What if someone said no? Do they kill him because he knows too much? Aren't the men the stupid ones? Also, what's with the lifelike form of a synthetic Nic if they're only going to implant chips in her brain? And if the town is integrated enough to allow one gay couple (played with absolutely every cliche in the book by Roger Bart and David Marshall Grant), why is there still no room for blacks, Asians, or other visible minorities? Perhaps Stepford is more like Hollywood than anyone imagined...
Even the tagline doesn't make sense. "The women of Stepford have a secret." Really? How's that? I thought they had no idea what's been done to them and they're merely soulless robotoids now. Speaking of that, this film goes too far with the "women as machines" idea when one spews money out of her mouth like an ATM. A scene like this (and Broderick's follow-up line) could have been hysterical. Instead, it's as flat as the prairies. Maybe that's because the whole concept as directed by Oz is just too damn creepy and dumb. I've mentioned the 1975 movie a lot, yet it wasn't all that good either. At least when you review, say, that 1998 atrocity 'Psycho', you can compare it to Hitchcock's fantastic original. With the two versions of 'The Stepford Wives', you're comparing a public toilet to its messy contents. Neither is appealing and you're better off staying away from both.
To Stepfordize my brain, write to [email protected]. And check out my website at http://groups.msn.com/TheMovieFiend/homepage.
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