The Stepford Wives is a Stepford kind of movie.
It's a fluffy, dumbed-down version of an original.
The Stepford Wives is based on Ira Levin's 1972 novel about the insidious nature of conformity and dominance.
In Levin's novel, an aspiring photographer and her husband and children move from the city to an idyllic, suburban community where there is no crime, no tension and no individuality.
All the women in Stepford seem blissfully happy being entirely devoted to their homes and husbands. They look and act like those moms on the old 1950s TV sitcoms, revelling in the notion that father really does know best.
Levin is the man who wrote the horror chillers Rosemary's Baby and The Boys from Brazil and The Stepford Wives was meant to be just as cautionary and creepy.
The 1975 version of The Stepford Wives, adapted by William Goldman, captured much of the novel's suspense and feeling of paranoia.
This new version was entrusted to Paul Rudnick, who wrote the screenplays for The Addams Family Values, Jeffrey and In & Out and who writes the satirical movie review column in Premiere Magazine under the moniker Libby Gelman-Waxner.
Rudnick's forte is camp humour and that's where he has taken The Stepford Wives.
It's a silly, outrageous comedy of ill manners.
Nicole Kidman is Joanna Eberhart, an uber feminist who runs a top-rated TV network and emasculates every male she comes in contact with, including her wimpy husband Walter (Matthew Broderick).
Joanna gets sacked when one of the men on her newest reality show goes berserk, kills his former wife and her new lovers and tries to assassinate Joanna.
To Rudnick and Kidman's credit, this opening sequence is a hilarious dig at the current reality TV trend.
Joanna has a complete breakdown, so Walter relocates the family to the suburban, gated Connecticut community of Stepford.
Rudnick has no idea what to do with the children for the rest of the film, so he sends them off to a camp, leaving Joanna and Walter plenty of time and space to bicker about their sexless, loveless marriage.
Walter desperately wants a real wife like good old mom or at least the nostalgic TV version of wives and mothers.
That's exactly the kind of women who inhabit Stepford.
They're all blond, busty, doting airheads, but not by accident.
Kidman's Joanna is hilarious in her black suits, with all the Stepford wives in their frilly, figure-hugging floral prints.
Joanna finds allies in Jewish male-bashing writer Bobbie Markowitz (Bette Midler) and flamboyant gay architect Roger Bannister (Roger Bart), who also have been targeted for reprograming.
Rudnick gives the film's best lines and shtick to these lambs being led to the slaughter, while robbing Broderick, Glenn Close, Jon Lovitz and Christopher Walken, who have nothing to work with.
Rudnick, whose columns are vicious attacks on other films and filmmakers, commits most of the same crimes he claims to abhor in commercial films.
His movie makes little sense. It's all just one-liners and garish slapstick.
At one point, the film suggests the wives are actual robots.
Rudnick has one woman function exactly as a bank machine and another spin out of control like a toy whose wires short circuit.
He even provides a robot dog to suggest what has happened to the women, implying their real counterparts are in suspended animation in rooms in Stepford's Men's Club.
For the film's climax, he decides it's just microchips implanted in the women's brains that make them function like robots.
The only explanation is that Rudnick wasn't about to let any sense of logic interfere with the laughs, but there are enough of those to keep the film buoyant for 90 minutes.
(This film is rated PG)
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