Directed by Frank Oz
Written by Paul Rudnick
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick and Bette Midler
Classification: PG
Rating: *
T he Stepford Wives is not just a title, but a modern archetype — the physically perfect, emotionally and intellectually suppressed, suburban helpmate, created by Madison Avenue in the Eisenhower era.
Before films like Far from Heaven and Pleasantville, even before Betty Friedan declared the suburban dream home a “domestic prison,” there was something suspicious about the happy ideal of the fifties housewife.
Time magazine, in a 1960 cover story about The Suburban Wife, suggested that she, and not her war-vet husband, was the one suffering from post-traumatic stress: “If she is not pregnant, she wonders if she is. She takes her peanut-butter sandwich lunch while standing, thinks she looks a fright, watches her weight (periodically), jabbers over the short-distance telephone with the next-door neighbor...Spotted through her day are blessed moments of relief or dark thoughts of escape.”
There was a sharp political edge in the original 1975 movie, which popularized the Stepford wife image. With a script by William Goldman ( The Princess Bride) based on the thriller by Ira Levin ( Rosemary's Baby), The Stepford Wives was a satire about the post-feminist backlash. Given a choice, it suggested, men would prefer their wives conform to the subservient homemaker ideal, even if it meant lobotomizing them or replacing them with sex and house-cleaning robots.
Now we come, foot-dragging, to The Stepford Wives, 2004 version. Perhaps the best way to describe it is to say it is essentially a Stepford movie: A pretty clone with its brains removed, lurching about robotically and reciting predictable inanities. Re-shot, chopped and joked up, the troubled $90-million (U.S.) production has had its character lines erased but still shows all its plastic-surgery scars.
Nicole Kidman, the new Joanna, is a television network head, with a hairdo that looks like a black latex swimming cap. When we meet her, she's standing in front of an audience of television affiliate buyers, enunciating her rah-rah plans for the new fall season.
As Joanna is in the middle of presenting clips of crass reality shows (all of which have been outdone by more crass real shows), a bitter former contestant (Mike White) steps up from the audience. He pulls out a gun and declares that his new TV show idea is “kill all the women,” before he starts shooting.
Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to laugh at scenes that make you think of white-ribbon campaigns, although we can guess that writer, Paul Rudnick, who worked with director Frank Oz on the gay-themed movie Inside/Out, was trying for melodramatic camp.
Joanna loses her job and six months later, nodding off in wrap-around shades and stupefied by electro-shock therapy, her husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) decides to move her to Connecticut, where, despite no visible means of support, they buy a mansion and settle into the planned community of Stepford.
The town's No. 1 couple — the blond-pompadoured Mike (Christopher Walken) and his fixedly optimistic wife (Glenn Close) — welcome them. Otherwise, the men look like nerdy candidates for Average Joe, and the women like Barbie dolls, with big hair, big breasts and big smiles. (No great stretch for country singer Faith Hill, in her movie-acting debut.)
The only characters with functioning personalities are a Jewish woman, Bobbi (Bette Midler) and a gay man, Roger (Roger Bart).
For a while, Kidman's energetic, slightly shrill performance gives the movie energy, but the lack of any real satiric purpose renders the narrative stagnant. The scenes are repetitive: Joanna, Bobbi and Roger sneak into a woman's house; Joanna and Bobbi sneak into the men's centre.
There is no tonal consistency from scene to scene, swinging from domestic drama to farce. Most of the actors — especially Matthew Broderick — look lost.
Unlike the original film, the audience knows far too early that the women, in their matching sundresses, are robots, commanded by gold remote controls that look like sex aids. Watching the women simper and behave as their husbands' slaves isn't funny so much as offensive. By the time the movie lurches through the last of its endings, there's no good will left to burn.
For all its supposed ramped-up comic intentions, there isn't a scene in the new Stepford Wives that's anywhere near as funny as one in the original movie, where Joanna, worried about her backward neighbours, attempts to get the Stepford women to join a “consciousness-raising” group. Agreeable as always, they readily join in — and end up engaged an intense discussion of the virtues of spray starch and the merits of various cleaning products.
