THE REMAKE of The Stepford Wives with Nicole Kidman came trailing all the signs of a fiasco. There were reports of on-set bust-ups between Kidman and the director, Frank Oz, with Bette Midler weighing in for good measure. There were disastrous test screenings and frantic reshoots. And there definitely is a new ending and a brutally expedient final cut that runs to only 90 minutes. But thanks to the older demographic — who have little else to see during the summer — The Stepford Wives was able to open in America with a bullet-dodging take of $22 million.
The US critics have been mostly damning, but it is not a total mess by any means. The first half works in a frenetic swishy fashion, helped along by some zippy throwaway lines. “Gay Republican? That’s like wanting to be gay with a bad haircut.”
The second half is a different story. An out-of-control farce that ruptures with the collision of two distinct concepts, camp comedy and straight horror. The original of The Stepford Wives, made in 1975, was an out-and-out horror film. A New York family settles in a picture-perfect Connecticut town and the free-thinking wife discovers the town’s terrible secret: the lush, subservient women are all robots — and she’s next.
The title became a catchphrase for Martha Stewart-style automata living in a state of suburban conformity, and spawned a drag queen catchphrase: “I’ll simply die if I don’t get that recipe.” This goes some way to explaining the gay sensibility behind the new version, which is billed as a “comic reimagining”. The writer, Paul Rudnick, is the agreeably queenish pen behind films such as In and Out and the Libby Gelman-Waxner column in Premiere magazine. There’s no denying his skill with a bitchy one-liner (“Au pair is just French for teen with an agenda”). But his Stepford Wives is a musical comedy closet case.
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It’s dressed and acted like a stage show with a stylised 1950s look, like Far from Heaven on acid. This makes it a designer’s dream, but it blunts all the satire. What modern man seriously wants his ideal sex object to exercise in high heels and cocktail dresses? The film would still work as a soufflé comedy of ordinary people who stray into a bubble of make-believe. But it shifts gears fatally halfway through when it decides to play the thriller elements for real.
It creates a false ending at the end of Act II, when all is supposedly lost, and then bounces back with a “gotcha” twist in the third act that is completely unbelievable, even for a musical comedy, and not even played for laughs.
The Stepford Wives redux proves once again that it is virtually impossible to graft the fantastic on to an already silly universe without overdoing things. There is rich tradition of dark American comedies that create their own suburban Gothic worlds: The Witches of Eastwick, The Addams Family, Edward Scissorhands, etc. But these are all conventional comedies or fairytales at heart.
The Stepford Wives joins the other list of dark comedies, such as Death Becomes Her, Death to Smoochy and SheDevil, that overload their visual inventiveness with random tonal shifts and rapid, alienating character changes.
Horror works best by starting with the familiar and revealing the fantastic. The American Gothic comedies, which this film resembles in terms of its extreme design and faux Elmer Bernstein score, work in reverse. They create fantastic worlds and then show the comfortingly familiar inside. The Addams Family really do behave like a normal family, for all their inversions. Edward Scissorhands is a fable about being different in suburbia.
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The Stepford Wives does make a passable stab at explaining why post-feminist men would want to turn their wives into robots. These prerobot women are not homemakers who want out, they are ballbreaking careerists who earn more than their husbands and beat them at sports. As one husband put it: “We became the girls.” But one can’t help feeling the smart way to have updated this conceit would have been to let the women take charge and create The Stepford Husbands.
Meanwhile, despite the summer schedules piling up with releases, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban stayed top of the US box office for a second week, but with a take of only an estimated $35 million. This was a massive 70 per cent drop from its first week and means that Shrek 2 is the frontrunner to be the year’s biggest hit, ahead even of The Passion of the Christ. The animated feature’s current tally is $354 million and climbing.
Among the week’s new hopefuls were The Chronicles of Riddick, starring the year’s least likely duo, Vin Diesel and Judi Dench. One supplies the gravel-voiced muscle, the other Shakespearean class. You can figure out which is which.
This sci-fi adventure is a surprising sequel to Pitch Black, a gory B-movie from 2000 which was none too successful to begin with. Second time around the alien-bashing violence has been diluted to appeal to young teenagers and it has paid off. The film opened with $26 million, tying with the big-screen version of Garfield, the feline comic strip, which features the voice of Bill Murray in droll, dry, morbidly disbelieving mode. Subtext: this is what I get for winning a Golden Globe?