The Stepford
Wives (2004)
black comedy
directed
by : Frank Oz
featuring
: Nicole Kidman - Matthew Broderick - Bette Midler - Glenn Close - Christopher
Walken
running
time : 1 hour 33 minutes
Ira Levin's best-selling novel about
a town where great wives aren't born but made gets a second screen adaptation
in this darkly satirical comedy drama. Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman)
is a successful television executive until one day her career hits the
glass ceiling and crashes to the ground. Looking to take some time off
to start over, Joanna and her husband, Walter Kresby (Matthew Broderick),
pull up stakes and move to the peaceful suburban community of Stepford.
Walter takes to his new environment with real enthusiasm and joins the
local men's organization, headed by one Mike Wellington. Joanna, on the
other hand, finds that Stepford is just a bit too quiet and well-groomed
for her taste, and is taken aback by the aggressively cheerful and servile
attitude of Mike's wife, Claire (Glenn Close), and the other women of the
community. A notable exception is Bobbi Markowitz (Bette Midler), a happily
misanthropic writer who revels in her lack of enthusiasm for housework
or exercise. Joanna and Bobbi become fast friends, but as they look closer
at the all-too-perfect surfaces of Stepford and its female inhabitants,
they slowly discover a terrible secret lurking beneath. Also featuring
Faith Hill, Jon Lovitz, and Roger Bart, The Stepford Wives was previously
adapted for the screen in 1975, with Katherine Ross in the lead; that version
spawned three made-for-TV sequels.
Whoever came up with the idea
to remake The Stepford Wives as a satirical comedy had a superb moment
of inspiration. Paul Rudnick fills his script with the kind of catty one-liners
that he is best known for, and figures out how to put new spins on the
old premise. The casting in the film is right on the money. Close embodies
the spirit of Stepford with a regal insistence. Broderick consistently
manages to find all three dimensions in a character that seems underwritten
until the final act. Just as she did in To Die For, Kidman shows that she
has a gift for a particular type of cold-hearted comedy. Roger Bannister,
as a very flamboyant gay man who has been brought to Stepford by his straight-laced
Republican life partner, perfectly delivers all the bitchy, outrageous
lines not already reserved by Midler. The film falls apart when it abandons
the comedy in favor of actual suspense. Somewhere in the middle of the
film, Kidman is surrounded in her home by the men of Stepford, but the
film's tone has been so light and inconsequential it can not muster the
slightest bit of terror or suspense. Sadly, an arbitrary third-act twist
fails to wrap up the main story in an interesting way — even as the story
line about Kidman and Broderick's marriage comes to a satisfying conclusion.
One gets the feeling that Rudnick got it right on the page, but that Frank
Oz was unable to get that film on the screen.