The Stepford Wives Movie Review

Somewhat artificial and mechanical itself, The Stepford Wives is not quite the train wreck you'd hope it would be, but instead just a plain old failure, a comedy saddled with a germ of a clever idea that it never manages to exploit in the right way. Too mainstream to be totally camp (which is just another way of saying it's a little too straight to be fully gay), Stepford tries to grasp for a tone throughout its entire 93 minutes and ends up being just a mishmash of old jokes, shellacked colors and promising set-ups that are never fully thought through. Reams of extra footage must be sitting around somewhere that perhaps, put together, would result in a comic opus of hilariously bad proportions. Instead, we're left with a cadaverous comedy in which each principal cast member gets exactly one good joke apiece – except for leading lady Nicole Kidman, who due to her top-billing status, gets two.

This Stepford's comedy spin isn't such a bad idea, as the previous two incarnations, the Ira Levin novel and the 1975 film starring Katharine Ross, were minor gems in their own right. Levin's novel was a canny study in paranoia and a sly poke at the politics surrounding the then-burgeoning women's movement, and Bryan Forbes' film was a taut thriller that came right out and said that men were trying to replace their wives with compliant robots (Levin never confirmed that premise in the book). Comedy would be the only way to go, what with "Stepford Wife" now a boldface phrase in our cultural lexicon, but director Frank Oz and screenwriter Paul Rudnick (who worked together on the just-as-even but much funnier In & Out) seem to be too much in love with their own ideas to ever actually sit down and make them work. It's the difference between laughing with some friends about a cute concept and actually trying to realize the ideas that make you giddy. It all has a "oh, but you should have been there when we pitched it!" kind of feel – you bet it was funny once, and damn, it would have been nice to have heard it the first time! Oz and Rudnick also prove to be their own worst enemies, drawing out every joke just a few steps too far and starting the movie off on the entirely wrong high-heeled foot. Joanna Eberhart (a game if miscast Kidman) is a stick-insect, Prada-wearing, short haircut, uber-corporate type who runs a highly successful television network (strike one). At the upfront presentation for her new fall line-up, Joanna unveils a string of reality programming shows, each one more absurd and stupid than the next (strike two). And then during it all, the cuckolded husband of one of her show's contestants bursts into the auditorium wielding a gun and tries to shoot Joanna, a ploy she merely shrugs off and then pitches to her boss as the premise for a TV special (strike three). Already, within ten minutes, Oz and Rudnick have taken one of the screen's most-adored actresses and turned her into a cold, heartless, unlikable bitch – with a bad haircut no less. It's a stumble from which the movie never fully recovers, and anyone with a memory of the luminous Katharine Ross as the original Joanna will just be thinking, "Why should I care about this chick?"

After recovering from a nervous breakdown, Joanna readily accedes to the suggestion of her husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) to move to the bucolic haven of Stepford, Connecticut, where McMansions and pastels are the norm and every house has a "great room" that seems like a photo spread right out of Affluent Suburban Monthly. Put off by the seeming perfection of the Stepford female population (including gorgeous but unutilized Faith Hill), Joanna attempts to escape the clutches of maniacal housewife Claire (Glenn Close) and ultimately finds solace in the friendship of the only two other Manhattan stereotypes in range: pushy Jewish broad Bobbie (Bette Midler) and sniping, effeminate architect Roger (Roger Bart). Soon, though, Joanna finds her newfound friends turned into a doting hausfrau and Gay Republican, respectively (though it would have been more fun the other way around), and starts to wonder if her loving husband has some kind of transformation in mind for her as well.

The first hour or so of The Stepford Wives is filled with overtly obvious jokes about the the city vs. suburbs, from SUVs to Christmas cookbooks to Joanna's all-black wardrobe, though the movie does make a somewhat serious attempt to adhere to the storyline of its predecessors. (A notable highlight is the trio inadvertently listening in on a Stepford couple's ecstatic lovemaking, a raucous orgy of sound that prompts Roger to ask, "Is that a DVD?") But all the plot mechanics are rocketed through so quickly that there's no time to establish any characterizations or empathy for anyone. The upshot is that, despite some tasty one-liners dispensed here and there (one involving AOL, of all things, is a fantastic throwaway), we get to the "hey, they're really robots!" plot reveal way too early, about half an hour before the movie ends. The rest of the movie is a tacked-on resolution that, while giving one of the actresses in the cast a true B-movie, campy monologue, is neither thematically satisfying nor entirely logical. And even worse, it's just not funny.

You knew Kidman's winning streak of the past couple years would have to come to an end sooner or later, and while she certainly won't get any demerits here, Rudnick's sarcastic dialogue isn't really fully suited to her subdued comic style (let's just say, she'd never make a good fag hag). Midler more than delivers on her one-note character, for while judicious editing might have lessened her screen time, what she makes of it is biting, funny and somewhat spontaneous. And Close is the only one who really taps in to the film's aspirations to biting, bizarre humor, the kind that Rudnick made work in Addams Family Values – she gets the movie's few Wednesday Addams-worthy lines. It's the men of the film that fall far short of expectations – Broderick and Christopher Walken (as Close's husband, the head of the Stepford Men's Association) fail to register but slightly, and Bart takes his overweening gay stereotype beyond campy into just prissy and unfunny (and by the way, honey, we all know you're straight – give it a rest!). It's an unexplored theme that the movie perhaps should have made more of: it's the men we need to change, not the women.