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THE
STEPFORD WIVES
6/10
USA
2004 : Frank OZ : 93 mins
When the highflying
career of Manhattan TV executive Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman) takes
an abrupt nosedive, she suffers a nervous breakdown. Keen to remove Joanna
from the pressures of big-city life, her husband Walter Kresby (Matthew
Broderick) decides to relocate to the affluent Connecticut community of
Stepford. The family are effusively welcomed by local queen bee Claire
Wellington (Glenn Close), but Joanna soon notices something odd about
the place: the Stepford women are uniformly beautiful bimbos, happily
subservient to their nerdish husbands. Teaming up with fellow a pair of
equally-bemused newcomer/outsiders - slobby writer Bobbi (Bette Midler)
and gay architect Roger (Roger Bart) - Joanna discovers what has happened
to the Stepford wives, and realises that she herself may be next...
Though hysterically
panned by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, The Stepford Wives
- while flawed - doesn't deserve its status among 2004's worst-reviewed
releases. It's the latest victim of an increasingly familiar syndrome
whereby any remade movie is instantly elevated to "classic"
status, placed on a pedestal which is then deployed to deliver a gleeful
battering to the new version. The 1975 adaptation of Ira Levin's short
novel had a lot going for it, not least the stupendous lead performance
by the Katharine Ross - with able backup from Paula Prentiss in the 'Midler'
role.
 But
a "classic" it most certainly wasn't - largely thanks to the
lifeless direction by Bryan Forbes, the Londoner an odd choice for such
an explicitly American subject. Frank Oz may have been born in Britain
(Hereford, 1944) but shares little else in common with Forbes other than
than both changed their names for their acting careers (Oz was originally
'Oznowicz'; Forbes 'John Clarke'), and both directed movies of The
Stepford Wives.
Resident in
Belgium until the age of five, Oz moved with his family to the US where
he later achieved a kind of immortality as the voice of both Miss Piggy
and Yoda, while also directing such mid-level hits as In & Out
(1997). Perhaps keen to avoid Forbes's underwhelming approach to Stepford,
Oz goes too far the other way: everything is slightly but distractingly
amped-up and over-emphatic, especially the intrusive score ('music supervisor'
Randall Poster, music by David Arnold) and the lighting. No particular
individual is credited on the latter front, so let's blame cinematographer
Rob Hahn for the shadows which are always falling in odd ways over the
characters' faces.
Other visual
contributions (from costumer In & Out costumer Ann Roth, production
designer Jackson De Govia, art director Peter Rogness and set decorator
Debra Schutt) are also decidedly OTT - but this is entirely in keeping
with the unbridled camp that characterises the whole affair, right from
the excellent opening titles featuring jawdropping clips from fifties
adverts. The uber-camp factor we can presumably chiefly credit scriptwriter
Paul Rudnick - who also wrote In & Out, following it up with
2000's flop biopic Isn't She Great (Midler as Jacqueline Susann),
but is best known for the catty magazine column he writes for Premiere
as 'Libby Gelman-Waxner'.
His Stepford
script doesn't hang together very well, and Rudnick simply isn't up
to the very tricky task of combining politically-tinged post-feminist
(and post-Far From Heaven)
satire with belly-laughs and sci-fi horror. One-liners are much more his
forte, and there are just enough decent "zingers" to make the
film a reasonably enjoyable night-out-at-the-pictures entertainment. Most
of these go to Bart, though he scores his biggest laughs via his awestruck
facial reactions to Close's delirious characterisation of Claire. Because
while Kidman has never been much cop at comedy, the much more versatile
Close injects sufficient manic energy to keep the whole rickety vehicle
barrelling along.
Christopher
Walken, however, has rather less to do as her shadowy husband Mike, and
isn't as creepy or memorable a villain as Patrick O'Neal's Dale Coba from
the 1975 version. That said, the two characters turn out to be far from
exact match-ups: Rudnick and Oz build up to the same downbeat finale as
the original, then (in a ploy reminiscent of George Sluizer's Hollywood
remake of his own The Vanishing)
cobble on an invented ten-minute coda in which Joanna gets her revenge
and the truth about the Wellingtons is revealed.
As has been
widely noted, this ending doesn't tie in with what's gone before, and
is reportedly the consequence of disastrous test screenings and hastily-arranged
reshoots. The 'operation' to 'save' the film is a botch-job, with the
stitching clearly visible. But the coda itself has enough droll wit to
make its addition worthwhile - and does afford Close the opportunity for
one last great Joan Crawford-on-steroids blow-out which, like the picture
itself, makes no sense in retrospect but is quite entertaining while it's
going on.
1st August,
2004
(seen 22nd July : Odeon, Newcastle-upon-Tyne : press show)
by Neil
Young
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