REVIEWED - THE STEPFORD WIVES: I suppose you have to admire a film that casts the increasingly inhuman and mechanical Nicole Kidman as one of a town's few non-robotic housewives, writes Donald Clarke.
Not much else can be said in favour of Frank Oz's hopelessly muddled remake of Bryan Forbes's only so-so 1974 dystopian fantasy in which a group of men, troubled by what we then called Women's Lib, swapped their wives for compliant cyborgs.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the decision taken by Paul Rudnik, writer of In & Out and Addams Family Values, to transform the movie into a broad farce. If nothing else, this gives Dame Bette Midler, playing a comically heightened feminist of the Andrea Dworkin school, an opportunity to squawk and bellow as only she knows how. But so scattershot is the film's comic discharge that its satirical purpose becomes impossible to discern.
There is something here about the emptiness that awaits the ambitious at the top of the corporate ladder. Kidman plays an amoral TV executive, with no time for family or friends, who gets fired after a fatal disaster on a reality show. But when she and her husband (Matthew Broderick) move to the gated community of Stepford, the film turns its guns on the favourite target of hoity-toity, Hollywood liberals: white-bread, middle-America with its stay-at-home Moms and immaculate picket fences.
Later on, however, the picture seems to be dealing with what it sees as a repressed desire on the part of modern women to return to the values of their mothers. There is something about gay couples (in Stepford?) lying to themselves and trying to behave just like straight suburban families. Then, just when you are thinking that such couples should be allowed to behave that way if they feel so minded, somebody says just that.
What exactly is going on here? The Stepford Wives feels like the result of a desperate act of panic. Saddled with an expensive star and a high concept that no longer has any satirical resonance, the film-makers have crammed together half-a-dozen hare-brained sociological musings, each picked to appeal to a separate target audience, into one ungainly, lumpy package. Such a strategy was always likely to deliver a film that appealed to nobody rather than everybody.
