The Stepford Wives" is a remake of the 1975 film of the same name, and keeps the same basic premise as the original. A young couple from New York move to Stepford, a quiet, affluent Connecticut suburb, where something very strange seems to be going on. The remake keeps many of the names of the main characters; the main female character, for example, is still called Joanna Eberhart and her husband Walter. It makes, however, many changes to the plot and, more fundamentally, is very different in mood. Bryan Forbes' film was a dark science-fiction thriller with satirical overtones. Frank Oz's version aims to be a camp black comedy, but is never really dark enough for that and ends up more like a camp pale grey comedy.
The 1975 film seems an odd choice for a remake, as it was very much a film of its time. Made when feminism was at its height, it can be seen as a satire on contemporary sexist (or "male chauvinist", to use the seventies term) attitudes. Alternatively it can also be seen (and some seventies feminists took exception to it for this reason) as a satire on contemporary feminism, or at least on the anti-male paranoia of the more extremist wing of the movement. Stepford is a sexist dystopia, a place where the crude, boorish men have won the battle of the sexes and, quite literally, reduced their wives to robots. The moral, depending on your point of view, is either "This is how some men see women!" or "This is how some women see men!" In the original film the robotic wives were all attractive, sexually willing and (given that it was made in what has become known as the "decade that taste forgot") surprisingly stylish and elegant in their long, flowing dresses, and it is just about conceivable that their submissive, domesticated attitude represented what some men of that period, at least the older ones, saw as an ideal of femininity. In the remake the wives are still attractive, although their uniform (pastel-coloured floral dresses and big hats) is not as stylish as that of their seventies predecessors. What Oz and the scriptwriter have failed to take into account, however, is the changes in cultural attitudes which have taken place over the last three decades.
Today feminism is not the hot topic that it was in the seventies, not because modern women see the feminist cause as irrelevant but because they see most of the battles of that era (over equal pay, for example) as having been fought and won. Women who dress and act like stereotypical bourgeois housewives from the third quarter of the twentieth century cannot be said to represent the modern male's ideal of femininity, especially as the Stepford Wives' sole interests are fashion, cooking, shopping and home decoration, subjects which bore most men to distraction. Twenty-first century man's ideal woman seems to be the ladette, essentially himself incarnated in the body of a beautiful babe, so it might have been funnier to remake the film as "The Stepford Girlfriends", with the brainwashed women looking and dressing like lads'-mag pin-ups whose main interests (apart from sex) are sport, drinking lager, watching action movies and playing violent computer games.
For an actress who at her best can be very good (as in the recent "Australia"), Nicole Kidman has a depressingly large number of mediocre or downright bad films on her CV, and this is one of them. One of its weaknesses is that her character, Joanna, is so unsympathetic. In this version, all the wives are high-achieving businesswomen or professionals before their transformation into domestic goddesses, and the funniest scenes in the film are the satirical early ones dealing with Joanna's earlier career as a top television executive. Unfortunately, the main effect of these is to create an indelible impression that Joanna is a prize bitch whose sole achievement is a massive dumbing-down of the nation's culture and for whom transformation into a robotic zombie would be a fitting punishment. Her programme in which happily married couples have their relationship tested by the attentions of professional prostitutes and gigolos might seem tacky to the point of obscenity, but the concept is not too far away from that of an actual reality show, "Temptation Island".
Another weakness is that, for a film which is supposedly satirising stereotypical gender roles, this one has a few stereotypes of its own, such as Bette Midler's characterisation of an obviously Jewish character as an insecure, neurotic whiner. The film confirms that Hollywood is tolerant of homosexuals if (and only if) they conform to type as liberal, witty, flamboyant and camp. A gay man who is, for example, politically conservative, sober in dress or quiet in his personality is regarded as an abomination against nature.
The film's worst fault, however, is its lack of inner consistency. The original intention was to follow the plot of the 1975 version, in which the wives are murdered by their husbands and replaced with robots, and the earlier scenes were clearly filmed with this idea in mind. This scenario, however, proved unpopular with test audiences, and a new happier ending was shot in which it is made clear that the wives are still alive and have merely been subjected to a reversible brainwashing process. Unfortunately, this ending not only makes little sense in itself but also makes a nonsense of most of what has gone before. There was obviously not enough money in the budget to reshoot the earlier scenes. (Moral; never allow test audiences to influence the creative process). Film lovers should stick with Forbes' much better original. Frank Oz should have stuck with the Muppets. 4/10
11 out of 16 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
