No Man’s Land | Meg Ryan and Annette Bening shop for frilly underthings in the all-female extravaganza The Women.
THE WOMEN
Directed by Diane English. Starring Meg Ryan, Debra Messing, Eva Mendes, Annette Bening, Jada Pinkett Smith. Opens Fri, Sept 12.
** 1/2
True to the promise of its bare-bones title, director Diane English’s remake of George Cukor’s 1939 film The Women (based, in turn, on Clare Boothe Luce’s play) is unabashedly a study in femininity. In fact, like the original, there’s not a single man in the entire cast — no husbands, brothers, or fathers ever appear onscreen, and during phone conversations we’re never privy to the male voice on the other end. Even the extras are all women (which is no easy feat, considering that more than one scene takes place on the streets of New York).
I’m guessing that the film’s audience will be a pretty accurate reflection of this onscreen demographic, with nary a Y chromosome in sight. With a poster proclaiming “It’s all about the women” accompanied by a huge picture of Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Debra Messing, and Jada Pinkett Smith gossiping about Eva Mendes, the underlying message to male moviegoers is clear: “Death Race is down the hall.”
So keep that in mind when I say that I, a man who enjoys melodrama and explosions in equal doses, found The Women to be a bit of a dud.
Ryan plays Mary Haines, an overworked fashion designer who accidentally discovers from a chatty manicurist that her husband has been having an affair with Crystal (Mendes), a smouldering, hip-swinging perfume salesperson — or “spritzer girl,” as Mary’s best friends Sylvia (Bening) and Edie (Messing) hiss to one another when they hear about it. “Manicurists and florists,” Sylvia mutters. “It’s frightening how much those people know.”
From here, the ensemble part of this ensemble comedy takes full effect, with a fair amount of screen time given to everyone from Mary’s preteen daughter Molly (India Ennenga) and their eavesdropping housekeepers to several players in the magazine industry, where Sylvia is an editor and Miriam (Pinkett Smith) a cutting-edge essayist (she also rounds out the movie’s BFF quadrangle). Candice Bergen, Bette Midler, and Carrie Fisher all have quirky bit parts — English, who also adapted the screenplay, was a longtime writer on Bergen’s TV series Murphy Brown — and before long your head spins just trying to imagine the budget it must have taken to get these dozen actresses, all of them competent and most household names, gathered in the same room.
The trouble is that neither English’s script nor her direction gives any of the talent much to play with. The pacing is jittery and most of the self-consciously “funny” dialogue falls flat, but my biggest problem with the film is its poorly thought-out stabs at moral righteousness. For example, Molly and Sylvia are both shown struggling with the destructive effects of advertising on women’s self-esteem. By the end, though, English has completely abandoned that thread and reverts to a lazy, ultra-conservative status quo: Molly looks in awe at the skinny models who dominate her mother’s fashion show, Mary’s mother (Bergen) gets painful face-lift surgery, and we’re fully expected to find these scenes triumphant and charming, rather than insulting.
It’s also strange that a film so focused on femininity is bookended by sequences that make women look about as shallow as possible. The opening credits are a third-rate Sex and the City outtake, introducing the characters via close-ups on their shoes (and sometimes dangling purses or shopping bags) as they walk down the street, encouraging us to equate personality with brand allegiance. And the last scene, where the bohemian Edie gives birth to her fifth child, is a bizarre duplicate of the climax in the male-dominated Knocked Up, only with the genders reversed. When four men act squeamish and grossed out by childbirth, it’s juvenile but forgivable, and maybe even realistic; when four women do it, you have to wonder who, exactly, the intended target of the joke is. It rings thoroughly false to my male brain, and it certainly doesn’t seem empowering.
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