Mildly diverting is about the best that can be said for The Stepford Wives, a remake so pointless it could be a globe. Adapting Ira Levin's chilly novel as a comedy, as opposed to the nifty 70s thriller which made the title a household phrase, the makers have missed out a crucial ingredient: laughs. Nicole Kidman is a burnt-out TV exec exiled to the 50s-style suburb of Stepford, where rich, style-free men live with impossibly beautiful and servile women. Something is suspect. And not just the script...
The original film, though far from flawless, stirred the shifting sands of sexual politics, playing on men's fear of women abandoning home for the workplace. In the 21st century Stepford, this transition has taken place. Kidman is a high-flier whose career crash leads her to question "maybe I've become the wrong kind of woman", while her hapless husband (Matthew Broderick) moans "your whole attitude makes people want to kill you". It's an interesting idea, that women's liberation has lead to a different kind of servitude - to the boardroom not the bedroom - but it's never properly explored. Also, given real-life inequalities in pay and conditions and the scarcity of women in senior management, it's bogus to suggest the struggle for women's rights has been won.
"IT JUST ISN'T VERY ENTERTAINING"
Social issues aside, The Stepford Wives just isn't very entertaining. Director Frank Oz assumes, probably quite rightly, that the audience knows why the sisters of Stepford so slavishly serve their men, but the lack of surprise or suspense cruelly exposes a similar lack of decent jokes. The satire is at its best at its broadest, with Bette Midler's blunt inspirational author (whose book on her mother is called I Love You, But Please Die) and Roger Bart's change from campy kook to Gay Republican. But by the time the mawkish and messy conclusion creaks to a close, The Stepford Wives proves to be a Stepford movie - a bland reproduction lacking life or bite: programmed for mediocrity.
The Stepford Wives is released in UK cinemas on Friday 30th July 2004.
The Stepford Wives (2004)
