'The Stepford Wives' review
Feminist backlash sold separately
By Ling Ma
Published: June 23rd, 2004 | 3:23pm
If the original version of The Stepford Wives were to debut today, it would be written off as an oversimplification of feminist claims and theories, feminism having evolved and branched out since 1975.
So the limited options in doing a remake of the cult horror film would be to a) give it a satiric edge, as to let the audience know that the filmmakers are in on the joke and b) adjust the plot more accordingly to the changing times. The new version of The Stepford Wives pulls off both modifications with some success.
The premise is updated with a few details: Joanna (Nicole Kidman) is a television-network president who is fired when a reality show on her network takes a violent turn. With her husband Walter (Matthew Broderick), the family moves into a Connecticut suburb in efforts toward a more tranquil life. As it turns out, all of the community’s married women are being programmed by their husbands into “the perfect wives,” which are, interestingly enough, pastry-baking submissives, not Maxim cover girls.
As we all know, feminism has developed negative connotations since the ’70s, bringing to mind angry extremists, and the film’s satiric edge may also be an attempt to alleviate these negative connotations by eluding too close an affiliation. The humor additive to the horror film, however, is unevenly and incongruently rendered, especially when the punchy one-liners coincide during more horrific climaxes. As a double genre, it’s not consistently funny enough, nor consistently scary enough.
Still, the new version does contain some other additives that are, if not predictable, nevertheless satisfying. It refuses to completely cop to that annoying either-or binary model of the woman as being either the pastry-baking submissive or the power-hungry network president. What should be pointed out is that as robotic as the pastry-baking submissives are, Joanna is just as robotic as the power-hungry network president. In the role of her job, she’s an astringent-looking, shrill-voiced, over-enunciated character who later admits to her husband that she just couldn’t stop herself from neglecting people she loved for her career.
Despite its inconsistencies, it’s difficult to dislike a film that tries to offer both seemingly opposite ends in the complex spectrum of female desires: the desire for power and the desire for your husband to love you with a floral-print dress and a lemon meringue. As the surprise twist illustrates, neither of these desires should be underestimated in emphasis of the other.
Issue #25
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more