Cynical Cinema

“What do you think this is, some kind of 1930s movie?”

The Women, out Friday December 19th from Alliance Films, does a lot of things right.  And a lot of things wrong.  First, the things it does right.  The main thing it does right is in selecting an outstanding cast.  Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Debra Messing, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Carrie Fisher, Cloris Leachman, Candice Bergen, Debi Mazar, and Bette Midler are all tremendous actresses, and in one way or another, almost all of them are female-empowerment icons.  So to have them all in the same cast, in a movie about women, for women, called The Women, is a great achievement.

The Women is a remake of a George Cukor movie of the same name from 1939, which was based on a great play by Clare Boothe Luce, and wisely director Diane English keeps the plot basically identical, down to the names of the characters.  Cukor’s movie was a magnificent comedy, and a great adaptation of the play, and it was a good idea not to screw around too much with the setup or the characters.  Annette Bening is playing a role originally played by the great Rosalind Russell, and she is good.  Meg Ryan is playing Mary, the Norma Shearer role, and Eva Mendes vamps it up as the homewrecking, husband-stealing Crystal Allen, as well or even better than Joan Crawford did in 1939.

The cameo appearances are all very well done.  Bette Midler is terrific as a wild, free-spirited woman who meets up with Meg Ryan after she has discovered her husband is cheating, and over a shared joint she imparts some wisdom to Mary in a scene that is short but memorable.  Carrie Fisher is an inspired casting choice as a devious woman who has an encounter with Annette Bening, an encounter which leads to the disintegration of her relationship with Meg Ryan.  (Of course, these are catty, gossipy women, and the disintegration of any friendship is going to be temporary.  I don’t think I’m giving anything away here.)

The four women who are best-friends at the centre of the story are good together.  Jada Pinkett-Smith, Debra Messing, Annette Bening and Meg Ryan are all actresses worth watching just about any time.  And they have genuine conversations that are compelling, especially one between Ryan and Bening when they re-connect and patch up their friendship.  This is the scene with the best dialogue in the movie.

Now the bad stuff.  Jada Pinkett-Smith plays a lesbian.  Which is kind of neat for a second, but it soon becomes apparent that this is a cheesy plot device.  You see, there are no men in this movie.  At all.  No taxi drivers or busboys or doormen.  Nothing.  We never see, or even hear, Mary’s adulterous husband Steve.  The women shop at Saks, several times, where the only people in the store are women.  The only people working there are women.  They get their hair done and they go to manicurists, all of whom are women in establishments frequented only by women.  All of which makes sense.  But then they have to go out to dinner at a restaurant.  What kind of restaurant is frequented only by women?  Oh…a lesbian bar.  Or, I guess, a lesbian restaurant.  Do they have those?  I don’t know.  But then, it’s a good thing one of them is a lesbian so they have a reason to go to this restaurant.  Contrived much?

Now, the biggest problem.  Everything, at every moment in this movie, feels like it’s been ripped off from somewhere else.  And I don’t mean from the 1939 The Women.  The names and plot are taken from that film, but that doesn’t feel ripped off.  It’s more of a tribute.  But 2008’s The Women feels like the George Cukor movie, redone, as filtered through the templates of chick-flick fare over the past forty years.  It’s the 1939 The Women as processed through Nine Months, The First Wives Club, and of course Sex And The City.  There are four women…they talk frankly and bitchily about sex and relationships, they use smart-ass quasi-witty words, they worry about fashion, they hang onto each other for advice…OK.  We’ve seen this before.  It was called Sex And the City, and I didn’t like it much then either.

And the final thing that is wrong with The Women.  It drives me nuts when chick flicks think that throwing in all the things they think women love is enough to make women love…the movie.  Like, in The Women.  Where the announcement of a pregnancy is cause for oohs and aahs.  And the problems of life are discovered and solved over manicures and hairstyles.  And the dropping of brand names is de rigeur, and a totally normal part of regular conversation.  And then, the worst thing chick flicks do - the painful, obvious, stupid final scene of Debra Messing giving birth - get it?  Women love babies!  And the other three women freaking out and running around and acting bonkers in the delivery room.  Hilarious?  No.  Stupid. 

This is the worst scene in any movie aimed at women.  It was done once, in Nine Months, and that was enough.  People panicking in delivery rooms is no longer funny.  Women giving birth and yelling at people because they are in so much pain and they just want to get this baby out of me is no longer funny.  It is now irritating, painful, and the worst possible way to end a movie that could otherwise have been reasonably good.  What I hope for this movie, more than anything, is that it gets people to watch the George Cukor The Women from 1939.  Because that film was excellent.  And this one sure isn’t.

The cover of the DVD “Cougar Club” certainly seems to indicate toplessness. As does the banner splashed across the jacket, “topless menus!” And it delivers! There are indeed topless girls in the menus. Possibly cougars, but likely a little too young to truly be actual cougars. So…if you click around on the menus, you will see boobs. If you watch the film all the way to the end, you will see boobs there as well, in a monatage of boobs over the closing credits. In between, during the movie itself, there are not many boobs. But a few boobs. In short, the only thing this movie has going for it is boobs, but there are not enough boobs to make this boob of a movie any less of a boob. The dialogue in the film is just about as clever as my own in the first part of this paragraph. An altogether painful experience, Cougar Club.

I know what you are thinking. If you knew it was just going to be one of those stupid teenagers-have-sex-with-people movies, why did you rent it? Good question. The main reason was the cast. I saw the DVD case and moved on. But on a second pass, I saw the name Faye Dunaway! And I took a look at it. I then saw Carrie Fisher, Joe Mantegna, and Izabella Scorupco. I thought, there is no chance all these fairly significant actors (or, in the case of Dunaway, legendary actors) would all have made a terrible error at the same time, would they? But it appears that yes, they would. And there is a big problem with a movie that’s only premise is the promise of boobs. The problem is that people will rent the movie based on their desire to see the boobs of the actresses whose names appear on the cover of the film. When neither Fisher, nor Dunaway, nor Scorupco, and not even the wrestler Chyna (who gets big billing as well) doff their tops, even though they all have gratuitous sex scenes, it clearly undermines the rest of the boobs, which belong to nameless girls and are so gratuitous as to be comical.

The basic premise of Cougar Club is that two young guys go to work for a law firm, and discover that they can easily have sex with their bosses’ wives. So the wives recruit other cougars, the young guys recruit other young guys, membership fees are charged, and a brothel of inter-generation trysts is created. This all gets wrapped up nicely in one of the worst courtroom scenes in history, and definitely the most offensive back-of-a-courtroom scene of all time. I have spent a long time enjoying cougars myself, but…I have spent way too much time dissecting a movie that really shouldn’t ever even be discussed. This ends now.