Reviews

In Bryan Forbes’ 1975 thriller The Stepford Wives, Katharine Ross plays a young painter freshly from boho Manhattan to tory Connecticut, determined to shore up her flagging marriage to a milquetoast husband. Here she is, persuading a feisty new friend (Paula Prentiss) to help her form a consciousness-raising group. “I messed a bit with women’s lib in New York,” she confesses coyly. “I’m not contemplating any Maidenform bonfires, but they could certainly use something around here. Are you game?” Thirty years on, Ross’ Joanna Eberhart would be laughed off the screen as a namby-pamby suburban feminist — or, more likely, dismissed by the smug marrieds of post-feminism as a loser who lacks the smarts to have it all.

The time elapsed between the first Stepford Wives and this new remake by Miss Piggy himself, Frank Oz, is also the distance traveled from feminism to backlash. So, far from being a sensitive artist, Nicole Kidman’s Joanna, resplendent in button-up suit and geometric power hairdo, is the go-get-’em president of a company that makes reality-television shows specializing in the humiliation of men. Fired when one of her shows spins out of control, a blitzed Joanna is persuaded by her mild-mannered husband and underling, Walter (Matthew Broderick), to move with their two kids to the insanely picturesque Connecticut town of Stepford. There they receive an effusive welcome from local grande dame Claire Wellington (got up like a lemon meringue and played by Glenn Close with just a hint of Cruella de Vil), her husband, Mike (Christopher Walken), and a bevy of pneumatic belles with empty eyes and mad, frozen smiles. Alarmed by all this unblemished domestic bliss, Joanna teams up with tell-all memoirist Bobbie Markowitz (Bette Midler, putting her own exuberantly belligerent spin on the role so wonderfully played by Prentiss in the original) and gay lawyer Roger Bannister (a very funny Roger Bart) to try to uncover the secret behind the submissive wives and their schlubby but dominating husbands.

The original, written by William Goldman from the novel by Ira Levin, drew its sinister energy from an unconscious ambivalence toward the very women’s movement it sought to champion — and also from a mix of fear and hostility to capitalism, technology and suburbia. Reincarnated as social satire, the remake also takes on current hot-button issues: grasping corporations, technology run amok in the service of conspicuous consumption, anodyne Republicanism and ball-busting women. Contrary to recent rumors that it was a dud, the new Stepford Wives, with its chocolate-box visual style, archly heavy-handed foreshadowing and its scene-for-scene parody of the original’s fright strategies (Walken’s waxy menace is once again played for laughs), is a gas. It’s a relief to see Kidman, so gratuitously savaged by Lars von Trier in the awful Dogville, all lightened up and playing wittily off Midler and Bart.

But while screenwriter Paul Rudnick (who wrote Oz’s other good movie, In & Out) adds at least one significant insight to the original’s paranoid take on the battle of the sexes — that the Stepford community of “drooling dweebs and mindless babes” replicates the gender division we see every day on sitcoms and reality TV — there’s a price to be paid for all this levity. At the end, the movie turns some entertaining twists on the first movie that, coupled with a perky humanistic climax, may satisfy audiences’ desire for a marital happily-ever-after. For the sake of a good laugh, Oz forfeits precisely what makes the first Stepford Wives still so compelling — its critique of fascism.

Ella Taylor, LA Weekly Film Review

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