Oh good! The long-gestating remake of George Cukor’s bitchy masterpiece The Women has a trailer––and just in time to catch all those lady filmgoers in the afterglow of their weekend orgy! Some thoughts:
__Cukor’s original, released in 1939 and based on Clare Boothe Luce’s hit play, was basically a melodrama cranked up to the tempo of screwball; the performances today play as camp, but even the comedy is underlined with some kind of emotional truth. This new trailer plays broad, broad, broad throughout. The whole idea of the text is that it offers a glimpse into the way women behave when together in uncomfortably intimate spaces; going too big with the punchlines and the delivery seems like a tonal mistake.
–Where the original film had an ultimately cynical view of female friendships, depicting them as nuanced and unstable and constantly flipping between fingers-crossed faux sympathy, outright hostility and tentative trust, thisThe Women seems to be surrounding Meg Ryan’s Mary with a Sex and the City-like cadre of demographically varied Bestest Friends. The Annette Benning character, who I think is a stand-in for Rosalind Russell in the original film, seems annoying, but hardly the busy-body back-stabber that Russell made classic.
–What happened to Annette Benning? Wasn’t she, like, attractive, just a couple of years ago? I wonder if they’re purposefully making her look frumpy, to hammer home the point that she’s supposed to be slightly older than Ryan. Ryan, incidentally, looks neither old, nor young, nor like Meg Ryan. She just sort of looks like a ball of wax.
–In the original, Joan Crawford played romantic rival to Norma Shearer; in real life, both actresses were in their 30s, and the film didn’t suggest a beauty or an age gap between the two women as much as a gap in flash and class. Based on this trailer, the new The Women makes a big deal out of Ryan’s husband leaving her for the much-younger, much-foxier Eva Mendes. This would seem to turn the story into a midlife-crisis cliche, rather than a reckoning with the mysteries of long-term love.
–There was an amazing scene in the original where Shearer goes to Reno to get a divorce, and she stays in a house with (I think) Russell and Paulette Godard, and those two women literally get into a catfight––there’s a big close up of one of them biting the other’s leg, which is pretty much the raciest thing that I can remember seeing in a film released within ten years of the Production Code. From this new trailer, I can’t tell if there even *is* a divorce, or a Paulette Godard character, never mind leg biting. I understand the need to modernize, but The Women isn’t The Women without a cat fight.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth