Blog

BY MAGGIE SCOTT

George Cukor was considered a “woman’s director,” and his handling of the tart Clare Boothe Luce play, “The Women,” for the big screen in 1939 demonstrated his facility with the fair sex and their world. While it was still very much a man’s world at the time of this first version of a story of friendship tested by infidelity, Cukor’s characters effortlessly and wittily created a world of strength, intelligence and independence. This is irrespective of whether they embraced love and commitment to faithless men, or whether they brashly broke the rules of cookie-cutter femininity.

Cukor’s film fit its time and looked to the future a world war would hasten in the area of women’s lib. A clever conceit of the ’39 film was its total lack of males. All the people on the screen, no matter what the location for the action, were female. The significance of this absence of the male animal is lost on Diane English, who delivers a throwback remake that may have worked in the era of Doris Day.

In Cukor’s version you feel the women are exorcised of men. In English’s version, the women are haunted by men. Instead of thinking out of the box about cheating (think internet porn and on-line hookups) and about women’s empowerment, English plays it safe with stock characters (lower-class, man-trap hussy) that tow the outdated line.

After 13 years of clinging wife (Meg Ryan) and boring routine, Stephen Haines falls for the gold digger moves (“she looked him up and down like a lion looks at a slow wildebeest”) of Saks Fifth Avenue perfume counter “spritzer,” Crystal Allen (Eva Mendes).

A gossipy manicurist reveals all to one of Mrs. Haines’ friends, Sylvia Fowler (Annette Bening), who immediately pushes the panic button and loses all sense of discretion and proportion. The marital sky has fallen and the friends must go into battle mode; first, trying to protect their seemingly fragile friend from the truth and then rallying her with their collective sense of outrage, which gets directed at Crystal for the most part.

While Mary’s world and sense of self have been rocked, her friends are dealing with their own challenges to their status quo of career, motherhood and relationships. Edie (Debra Messing) is a pregnant, stay-at-home mother of several female children who believes she “needs to keep going until she gets a boy.” Sylvia is not making good on the goal of turning around Cache Magazine (“a thinking woman’s fashion magazine”). And, Alex Fisher (Jada Pinkett Smith), a lesbian who isn’t surprised at the fix Mary is in, has a trophy companion whose incompatibility to Alex is obvious to everyone. Adding to her domestic woe, which includes a pre-teen daughter uncertain about her own sense of self, Mary has been “fired” by her father from her hoped-for position as inheritor of the family business. Tabloid coverage of the affair creates a major rift between Mary and Sylvia.

With support from her all-too-understanding mother (Candice Bergen) and some sage advice (“what do you want, Mary?”) from a multi-divorced actors agent (Bette Midler) she meets at a camp, Mary is ready to make herself over. A character asks, “Why can’t there be a pill to make love go away?” You’ll wish there were a pill that would make this movie work.

There’s no better way to sum up the impact this remake makes than this post on the IMDB message board: “What’s next…’All About Eve’ with Jessica Simpson?” Rated PG-13 for sex-related material, language, some drug use, brief smoking.

Share on Facebook

Tweet

Follow us