From today's Oregonian....
Is there anything more depressing than when middlebrow filmmakers decide to remake bona fide classics that did not, under any circumstances, need to be remade?
Stallone's "Get Carter." The Burt Reynolds "His Girl Friday" remake "Switching Channels." NBC's 1983 "Casablanca" TV series starring David Soul as Rick.
Now we can add to that storied list rewriter/director Diane English's low-budget, kill-me-please unfunny "modernizing" of George Cukor's 1939 classic "The Women," itself adapted from Clare Boothe Luce's 1936 play.
The opening credits of Cukor's version associated each of the characters with an animal; English associates each of hers with a pair of shoes, immediately announcing that she'll be making a lame stab for the "Sex and the City" dollar. A pampered fashion designer (Meg Ryan) is fired by her father just as she finds out her hedge-funding husband is having an affair with a perfume-counter girl (Eva Mendes). Ryan's best friends -- a Blackberry-obsessed magazine editrix (Annette Bening), an upscale-bohemian breeder (Debra Messing) and a lesbian author (Jada Pinkett Smith) -- try to help Meg find herself and reconnect with her daughter (India Ennenga), between arguments and shopping trips and every-10-minute musical montages.
Annette Bening and Meg Ryan, together at last! It's like an all-star cast from 10 years ago!
English is a first-time feature director whose major calling card is TV's "Murphy Brown," and she spent something like 13 years trying to get this project on the big screen. She remixes the basic 1930s plot points, and like Cukor, she fills the screen exclusively with women, even in crowd scenes. She also tries to "update" the story to the 21st century -- and in the process ends up creating a lifeless mutant of a film.
For starters, English mildly perverts Luce's satire of shallow society women by dwelling on bland lifestyle worship. She also works in a dumb sitcom gags:
- A "Terminator"-style POV shot in which Bening evaluates all the merchandise at Sak's;
- Ryan telling her daughter a diaphragm is a travel coffee filter;
- Ryan dealing with her grief by dipping a butter stick into powdered cocoa and munching away;
- Carrie Fisher delivering all her lines while looking about 30 seconds from a thrombus on a treadmill;
- Bette Midler exhaling clouds of smug in a one-scene cameo;
- Ryan's daughter declaring her opposition to womanhood by making a little bonfire of tampons;
- A wacky birthing scene with Messing screeching and the other women flailing about and reconciling and making phone calls.
There are facelift jokes. Oy.
There are also nonsensical self-aware reminders that this a remake: When Ryan's mother (Candice Bergen) suggests going on a vacation retreat in the wake of the bad news, Ryan counters: "What do you think this is? Some kind of 1930s movie?" Huh? Do people not go on trips now?
Even worse, there's a real sense of a director and cast trying to pay homage to a classic '30s comedy without actually having the foggiest idea what made that comedy crackle and pop. "The Women" '08 adopts the vague form of the fast-talkin' stylized stage play, but English tries to execute the script using modern rom-com filmmaking techniques -- soft timing, naturalistic photography, a jaunty soft-jazz musical score that punctuates nothing. It leaves the movie feeling half-hearted, inert.
Admittedly, I'm as far from the target demographic for this film as Napoleon was from conquering Russia -- but I have to think even the most die-hard chick-flick aficionado is going to have a problem with Ryan's method of self-discovery: She tries to reconnect with her daughter by becoming a workaholic and spending more time away from home launching a fashion line. This profoundly privileged woman also starts tacking notes to the wall asking, "What do I want?"
English seems to confuse empowerment with narcissism, in other words. She adds crass sex jokes to "The Women" and seems to think it's all about female power. But really, it's just a coat of dirty lip gloss on a very dated story -- a story in which all these "empowered" women do is think about, talk about and weep over offscreen men. Males so consume these women's every waking moment, the XX chromosomes might as well be absent gods.
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D; 114 minutes; rated PG-13 for sex-related material, language, some drug use and brief smoking.
'The Women' (The Oregonian, Sept. 12, 2008)
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