The Stepford Wives

What men want: The Stepford Wives remake is a garish, incoherent mess

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Call them retreads, reworkings, even re-imaginings--a huge number of movies produced by Hollywood these days are simply rehashes of older, often better, films. And if L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein is right, that's not going to change anytime soon. "In today's Hollywood," says Goldstein, "if you're talking about serious drama, the original script is almost as extinct as the woolly mammoth."

The latest tale to be disinterred is The Stepford Wives, a chilling little 1975 "B" movie directed by Bryan Forbes and based on Ira Levin's dystopian novel about a pristine suburb where the men have conspired to kill off their wives and replace them with cleaning- and sex-obsessed robots. The heroine, Joanna Eberhard (touchingly played in the original film by Katharine Ross), is a young New York wife and mother struggling to make it as a photographer. When her husband whisks them all to Stepford to escape urban blight, Joanna is dismayed to discover her neighbors are all blow-up dolls in frilly aprons whose less-than-hunky mates congregate each evening in a forbidding mansion known as the Men's Association.

Levin's minimalist horror story--which shares its sinister view of middle-class marriage with another of his novels, Rosemary's Baby--benefited from Forbes' imaginative direction (in an era when opening shots were routinely lavished with creative attention, this one still amazes) and screenwriter William Goldman's tartly observant script ("I like to watch women doing little domestic chores." "You came to the right town.") The result was a genuinely creepy film that sustained its suspense all the way to the final, horrifying scene.

Director Frank Oz and screenwriter Paul Rudnick (In & Out) approach the remake brandishing their own, quite different, ideas. Replacing the horror with camp and the wit with witlessness, they've created a garish, incoherent mess, from the tired opening montage of '50s housewives swooning over sleek appliances to an ending so idiotic even Christopher Walken--not exactly a stranger to loony scripts--looks confused.

Oz and Rudnick's Joanna (now played by a brittle Nicole Kidman) is the head of a TV network whose firing becomes an opportunity to bake cupcakes for her neglected husband (a suitably whipped Matthew Broderick). And while this new Stepford no longer has a black couple, it does boast a token Jewish duo (Bette Midler and Jon Lovitz) and a pair of gay marrieds played by David Marshall Grant and Roger Bart (who delivers every one of the film's best lines).

Though the original Wives, with its consciousness-raising groups and clear feminist thrust, now seems dated, the film worked because issues of patriarchy and male chauvinism were very much in the forefront of women's minds (the image of a man hauling a naked female mannequin through the streets of New York was an eerie hint of the horror to come). Yet the new film carefully avoids the fact that the obstacles faced by career-minded women--along with fears of being buried beneath an avalanche of domesticity and male power--have not changed very much. Retreating into farce, the filmmakers miss an opportunity to acknowledge that a day spent watching MTV will yield sights remarkably similar to their depiction of female breasts inflating at the touch of a remote-control button, or cash spilling from the gaping mouth of a wife-slash-ATM machine (played by country singer Faith Hill in a scene no doubt imagined by her record producer).

Absent the suspense and satirical thrust of its predecessor, The Stepford Wives is a star-studded, soft-centered piece of whimsy with less to say about sexual politics than other counterfeit-human movies like John Carpenter's Starman or Susan Seidelman's Making Mr. Right. In the new Stepford Wives, the real robots are behind the camera, not in front of it.