Stepford Wives

Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman) is an ultra-successful television executive until she pushes the “reality television” envelope too far. Looking for a fresh start, Joanna and her husband, Walter Kresby (Matthew Broderick), relocate to the super-affluent, bucolically peaceful Connecticut community of Stepford.

Walter quickly takes to their new life in Stepford, but Joanna finds the women of Stepford a little strange—too enthusiastically domestic and cheerfully subservient. Joanna finds allies in two fellow unassimilated outcasts—slovenly, misanthropic novelist Bobbi Markowitz (Bette Midler) and Roger Bart (Roger Bannister), the gay spouse of a straight-laced Republican. Together the trio begins to uncover the terrible secrets lurking beneath the lovely surfaces of Stepford.

What’s the biggest challenge in remaking ‘The Stepford Wives???” Although the majority of the original story was devoted to Joanna Eberhart’s struggles to discover the truth behind the women of Stepford, the novel and subsequent film adaptation had such a powerful impact on pop culture that the term "Stepford wife" has been in the American vocabulary for the last couple of decades, robbing the unveiling of Stepford’s secrets of much of its potential shock value. So how do you make the story new again? Simple: two things—change the ending, then turn the whole thing into a comedy.

This new film version of Ira Levin’s 1972 satirical horror thriller of robotic conformism turns the dated-but-sinister psychodrama of the novel (and of William Goldman’s screenplay for Bryan Forbes’ 1975 film adaptation) into campy, ironic burlesque. It’s not as baldly mocking of ‘70s American popular culture as Todd Phillps’ recent film adaptation of “Starsky & Hutch” (the cop show that premiered on ABC in 1975, the same year the original ‘Stepford’ hit the screen), but this film is also not your mother’s ‘Stepford Wives.’ Oz and Rudnick offer another turn of the screw, an ironic twist that upends the original story.

Ultimately, “Stepford Wives” is unsuccessful because, in diverting the story’s energies from thriller to comedy, Oz fails to bring together the various story pieces into a unified whole. Midler, Bannister, and Jon Lovitz are funny in supporting roles, but Christopher Walken is wasted as Mike Wellington, the community patron, and Glen Close delivers an over-the-top performance as his wife Claire. A decent lead performance by Nicole Kidman is undercut by the fact that, with the possible exception of country singer Faith Hill (in a performance that, appropriately is largely mute), throughout the film, Kidman looks more like a idealized Stepford wife than any of the other “wives” in the film.

Matt Parks (7.11.2004)