"If you don't get it, don't make it."
“The Women”
offers convincing proof that Hollywood is incompetent when it comes to
portraying contemporary New York women. If you don’t get it, don’t make it.
Clare Booth Luce’s savage play slid perfectly into the screenplay written by
Anita Loos and directed by George Cukor in 1939. Luce, Loos, and Cukor
understood the nature of the Manhattan social competition of the ‘30s; they
would have understood it today. Diane English does not.
In trying to
remake the movie in present day terms, English has resorted to the outdated
premise that idleness equals boredom equals gossip. In today’s New York, the
players are rarely idle or bored. In the ‘30s, when their power derived only
from their men, they lunched and went to Reno for their divorces. Today they can
be found saving Central Park or the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan,
painting, writing, or running a business.
So who is
cast as the sophisticated wronged wife of an errant businessman? Meg Ryan. I bow
to no one in my admiration for Meg Ryan’s abilities as a queen of light comedy.
But she is neither sophisticated nor even slightly credible as a New Yorker.
Annette
Bening, on the other hand, could easily play a Manhattan power executive but
here she is in the impossible position of delivering lines that are both
strained and labored. Bening plays Sylvie, a women’s magazine editor under
threat of being fired by her male boss. She has for years been the closest
friend of Mary (Meg Ryan) whose stockbroker husband is having an affair with
Crystal (Eva Mendes), the counter girl in the perfume section at Saks.
The movie is
a revolving door of the politics of friendship. Candice Bergen, as Mary’s
mother, manages, alone among them all, not to look silly. Annette Bening is
reduced to being one of many ordinary characters. Since there is nothing
ordinary about Ms. Bening, her performance becomes embarrassing. This entire
crew of fine middle-aged actresses is diminished by this genuine bust of a
movie. As we watch things slide downhill, we tend to remember other roles that
brought these actors to the top - Meg Ryan becoming an instant legend as she
faked it so spectacularly in the deli booth, Annette Bening in “Being Julia,”
Candice Bergen as the star of Diane English’s hit TV comedy “Murphy Brown.” The
blame for this failure must be laid at the feet of Ms. English who is apparently
responsible both for the script and the direction. Perhaps she just isn’t mean
enough for this job.
The real meat
of a movie like this lies in the edgy intelligence of actors bent to gossipy
cruelty, not in a group of middle-aged actors behaving like high schoolers in
the hall at lunch break. Clare Booth Luce and Anita Loos understood cruel
competition; they dipped their pens in acid to paint portraits of women who used
words as weapons. It’s that verbal warfare that we miss.
Copyright (c) Illusion