女人们 The Women 英语影评

　　 Back in the thirties, Clare Boothe Luce wrote The Women as a satiric evisceration of high-society matrons, taking barbed aim at their idleness and their hypocrisy and, yes, their back-biting bitchiness. Her staccato dialogue crackled with nasty wit, first on the stage and then in George Cukor's largely faithful adaptation. Seen through the mists of time, that movie seems a strange amalgam of the outdated and the modern, certainly not feminist in its content yet defiantly so in its design. That's because the story was structured to feature an all-female cast — although men were on the matrons' minds, not a single one of the cretins appeared on the screen. The Women, then, was a major studio picture carried entirely by women, including many of the era's brightest stars.

　　 Diane English's remake continues that male-free conceit, yet undermines just about everything else that gave the original its caustic edge. Gone are the idle femmes because, of course, women work these days. Gone is the trenchant dialogue because English, who made her name with the Murphy Brown series, can't write trenchant — her métier is the stiff and telegraphed stuff of the TV sitcom. Consequently, gone too is the satire, because that sort of attack would be politically incorrect and, more to the point, commercially unwise.

　　 What's left? Oddly enough, the central tenet of the plot remains: Nice wife Mary (Meg Ryan) discovers that her Wall Street hubby is having an affair with a Saks perfume clerk (Eva Mendes). His betrayal, however, isn't what interests English. In the thirties version, the men were unseen but palpably felt — theirs was the presence of an absence, a key yet invisible motivator that allowed Luce to direct her satiric pen at the ensuing catfights among the women. Here, that female bitchiness is replaced by something far more positive but infinitely harder to dramatize — female bonding.

　　 So, as in Sex and the City, the good mother Mary, who juggles family and career, is attended by three supportive pals, eclectically selected: Edie the lovably quirky earth mom (Debra Messing); Alex the gorgeously intelligent lesbian (Jada Pinkett Smith); and, most important, Sylvie the high-profile editor married to her job (Annette Bening). When news of the adultery breaks, the bonding begins, with the trio gathering around their wronged sister. As they do, the script echoes the original by reprising the confrontation scenes with that designing perfume clerk — at her sales post, then in the change room of the lingerie department. But these battles are bloodless here, mainly because English can't bring herself to toss a sharp dart at any woman, not even the putative home-wrecker.

　　 Instead, she looks to find drama by shifting the focus of betrayal. When Sylvie says what no contemporary editor ever would — "It's time to stop talking down to our readers" — that heresy prompts two predictable outcomes: (1) It puts her precious job in instant jeopardy, and (2) it leads to a narrative twist that has her selling out Mary to save her career. In the moral canon of the travelling sisterhood, that's a no-no vastly worse than any male treachery — you expect it from a mere man. Fortunately, this is the kind of movie where rifts can be healed whenever the third act demands. Just a quick meeting-of-the-minds and, hey girlfriend, all's well that ends well.

　　 Faced with such toothless dramedy, the principal cast can't be assigned much blame (please, no more Meg Ryan bashing). Exempt too are the cameos submitted by vets like Bette Midler, Candice Bergen and Carrie Fisher. On the whole, any blandness in the performances can be attributed to the blandness of the material. More annoying, though, are those moments when that material makes a clumsy jump from simply innocuous to wannabe didactic.

　　 For example, consider Mary's teenage daughter, who worries that she's "too fat," not conforming to those cultural ideals of female beauty. Well, on comes our editor to diss those ideals and allay the girl's anxieties, just before the movie (again, à la Sex and the City) launches into a fashion-show segment intended to prove Mary's newfound creative genius, a sequence where her designer duds are proudly showcased by — who else? — a parade of wafer-thin models. I think that's called having your (cheese)cake and not eating it too. For all its current political incorrectness, the original film at least attacked hypocrisy; this one practises it.

　　 In that particular case, the hypocrisy lies in the disparity between the image (a sensitive flick decrying distorted notions of beauty) and the substance (a popular flick peddling those very notions). Being on the wrong side of the gender fence, I'm hardly an expert, but it seems that, in the selling of women to women, from prettied-up movies to attractive vice-presidents, such hypocrisies not only abound but are a proven success. The image says one thing, the substance quite another, and still the sale is made. Obviously, men are no less susceptible to buying the sizzle without the steak; indeed, "mad men" may have invented the concept. But of all the freedoms that women have rightly earned, aping the worst of male behaviour needn't rank high among them.