New "Stepford Wives" more style than substance
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First off, to answer the question everybody is asking — no, Frank Oz's new version of "The Stepford Wives" isn't anywhere near as dreadful as its advance buzz would indicate. It's not especially good either, but any movie in which Glenn Close imitates a washing machine and Christopher Walken sports a blond bouffant with dark roots can't possibly be a total waste of time.
Those who remember the 1975 version of "The Stepford Wives" (based on Ira Levin's brief, chilling novel about suburban husbands who transformed their wives into perfectly subservient beings) may have to adjust their glasses for this one — Oz and screenwriter Paul Rudnick have taken the material on a screeching 180-degree turn, substituting camp humor and blinding-bright costumes for suspense and horror. And that's not necessarily such a bad idea; unfortunately, Oz and Rudnick can't quite sustain the mood they establish, and the movie ultimately has nowhere to go.
Essentially, the filmmakers have gone back to the book and created an entirely different take on it, adding a complicated backstory for their main character, Joanna (Nicole Kidman). Where she originally was a relatively contented woman who combined motherhood with a part-time career as a photographer; here she's a scarily heartless television executive in charge of a new lineup of reality shows. (A prologue in which we're introduced to these shows is hilarious — made all the more so by the fact that these shows are only a whisper more extreme than what's on TV right now.)
Thanks to a disgruntled contestant, things quickly go awry, with Joanna losing her job and suffering a nervous breakdown. This is all in the first few minutes of the film, and soon a near-catatonic Joanna's off to the suburbs with husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) and their two kids, planning a new start. But why are all the women of Stepford exquisite, ever-smiling and perpetually clad in pastels? And how did their dweeby husbands — who, to a man, have dorky haircuts and buck-toothed grins — land such dishes?
These questions are explored with humor rather than menace; it's all too silly to be remotely disturbing. (Watch Close, as the gleeful Stepford queen bee, leading an exercise class of ladies in floral dresses, swooping and swirling as "A Fifth of Beethoven" plays.) Rudnick, best known for "In & Out" and "Addams Family Values" (as well as the sublime Libby Gelman-Waxner column in Premiere magazine), is a master of the one-liner, and for a while this "Stepford Wives" bumbles along pleasantly, its giggles and eye candy going down nicely with popcorn.
But by taking out the horror, Oz and Rudnick have also lost the bite. The tension in the 1975 version came from the real-life social change taking place at the time, as the still-young feminist movement changed the power relationship between the sexes. Now, according to this movie, it's laughable to think that men might be threatened by successful women (alas, not true), and so the issue isn't explored at all — we don't really understand what's going on in Joanna and Walter's marriage, or what motivates either of them. And the movie's final third, in which a new and only partially satisfying ending is played out, feels like a muddle; you can sense the last-minute reworking that took place.
When "The Stepford Wives" is funny enough, none of this matters — and sometimes it is, particularly when Roger Bart (as a Stepford gay husband) is sashaying about in his color-coordinated separates, or Bette Midler totters through her impeccable home as a newly transformed domestic goddess, or Kidman poses in a Stepford grocery store in front of a perfectly symmetrical display of pastel-colored egg cartons, like the fully clothed centerfold of some suburban-bliss magazine. It could have been great satire, but it settles for silliness. That's better than nothing, but you wonder what might have been.
Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com
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