Another Bad Idea from the Bad Ideas factory — and this one’s just about as bad as they come: so unfunny and unintelligent, so clueless and so humourless that it sent me into a state of virtual anaphylactic shock. It’s an all-new, low-IQ version of Bryan Forbes’s 1975 movie of the Ira Levin bestseller The Stepford Wives, about a couple who move into an upscale suburban neighbourhood, where the creepy menfolk conspire to replace their wives with sexy-submissive robots.
Just like Tim Burton’s terrible version of Planet of the Apes three years ago, it vandalises a gutsy satirical classic, in this case with a mixture of misjudged condescension, smirking spoofery and culpable failure of nerve. Whatever you think of Forbes’s original picture, it had the courage of its convictions, and succeeded as feminist satire because it played everything straight: a chilling fantasy that was darkly funny because it never went for laughs.
This overegged ”comedy-thriller” update from Frank Oz can’t stop pre-emptively giggling at the idea that it could be guilty of something as demodé as feminism, though the f-word is never mentioned. What the new Stepford Wives appears to be satirising isn’t male chauvinism or suburban small-mindedness, but simply the original film — to which it is hopelessly inferior.
Now it is Nicole Kidman who plays the newcomer Joanna, a high-flying TV executive specialising in reality schlock. She has a top-rated show called I Can Do Better, which puts married couples on a desert island and tempts them into adultery. But a humiliated male contestant attempts to murder Joanna on the air; the network takes fright and fires her, so Joanna has a comedy nervous breakdown, with some hilarious references to her electro-shock treatment.
Her supportive spouse (Matthew Broderick) takes her away from the neurotic city for a new life in squeaky-clean Stepford, where they find Glenn Close and Christopher Walken presiding over the reactionary citizenry. Stepford has some sympathetic pals for Nicole: a Jewish writer (Bette Midler) who bridles at the Wasp-ness of everything, but who eventually submits to the goyish status quo. And this being the 21st century, there’s also a gay couple, including a witty camp guy (Roger Bart) who sort of adores the uptightness of it all, but whose Stepford makeover turns him into a ghastly gay republican.
Kidman is here being called upon to play comedy. Now, excellent performer though Kidman is, comedy is not and never will be her strong suit. You could as soon ask Danny DeVito to play James Bond. But it’s not her fault, and despite a couple of nice lines in the script for Midler and Bart, it’s the concept itself that is so awful. The big shocks that finished the first movie — the robot breakdown, Katharine Ross’s breasts getting bigger — are here shunted to the beginning, blowing the secret and crassly playing it for guffaws. A haywire fembot goes loco at a square-dance; another gets post-coital mammary enlargement via remote control. To which the only response is a wince of baffled embarrassment.
These Stepford wives are not funny or scary. So what are they? Director Oz and screenwriter Paul Rudnick don’t appear to be sure either. Everything appears to rest on the premise that the issue of sexual politics is a period piece. But the evocation of female submission is evasively presented as a kind of 1950s pastiche: the ladies dress in the absurd pinched-waist outfits of half a century ago, and when Walken presents a secret film about how the wives are surgically changed, it’s explicitly modelled on a kind of flickering high-school movie from that era. In fact, the whole thing is worryingly like the recent migraine-inducing, sex comedy Down with Love — especially the scenes in the glitzy network office, with Kidman sashaying self-consciously in her couture outfit.
Did we even need a remake? The 1970s original is not as obsolete as this dire film implies. A look at modern Hollywood, where the sleek supermodel template rules, might make you think that The Stepford Wives was not a satire, but a prophecy.
Rich pickings there, surely, for any satirist. But the new Stepford Wives steers clear of anything resembling real modern life, preferring its post-modern, retro-suburban world, with its bets hedged and its jokes mistimed. The worst moment is that demo film where Walken shows how women are lobotomised. That’s what this film is trying to do to the original. And to the audience. — Â