The Stepford Wives (2004)

The Stepford Wives: 2004, dir. Frank Oz. Seen on DVD (Jan. 3).
Last year, I bought an old library copy of the novel The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin. I wanted to read the source.
Wait, we need to go back even further. When I was junior-high age, I saw the 1980 made-for-TV movie Revenge of the Stepford Wives one night on TV. I don’t remember much about it except for Julie Kavner (remember when we used to see her as well as hear her? hee) … and the fact that the Stepford women were drugged, not robots. They all had to take little pills. At the end of the movie, the women all go crazy and stomp on the nasty man who’s been behind the whole scheme.

True confessions time: The reason why I remember this movie at all is because, while I was in eighth-grade, I wrote a “novel” (I doubt in retrospect it was novel-length, but it filled a whole looseleaf binder and maybe two) based on the idea, in which it turns out that an all-girls’ Catholic school is being run by an evil priest who has somehow brainwashed all of them in a Stepford-ish sort of way. At the end the girls all strangle the evil priest with their school-uniform ties. (This predated the 1987 made-for-TV movie, The Stepford Children, which I haven’t seen.)
I have not seen the 1975 movie, although I did read William Goldman’s description of it in Adventures of the Screen Trade, back when I read that book for a class at LSU. It did not sound like a movie I wanted to watch, what with the whole feminism-backlash theme and all. But the term “Stepford wife” has passed into general use as a result of that movie.
Okay. Anyway. Let’s return to last year, when I read the book. It was dreadful. It was poorly written, stuffed with I’m-not-creative-enough-to-find-a-single-word hyphenated adjectives. It didn’t build suspense well at all.
And the storyline didn’t make sense. In the book, Joanna and her husband have a strong relationship and seem to love each other very much. Her “feminism” consists of dabbling in photography and asking her husband to help with household chores. And yet he still decides to kill her and replace her with a plastic robot? The book implies that all men, given a choice, would prefer a plastic submissive chick to a real woman. I found this terribly distasteful. In fact, the book was so awful that I gave it away, when I am usually a prime book hoarder.
When I mentioned to some people that I’d read the book and found its general tone and theme unpleasant, someone told me, “Jette, it’s supposed to be a comedy. It’s funny. Didn’t you get it?” Well, no. I didn’t realize it was a comedy (assuming that was Mr. Levin’s intent). I missed the humor entirely. I thought it was another paranoiac suspense novel like Rosemary’s Baby, which I have no intention of reading, since I suspect the movie is superior to the book. In fact I have to wonder why Ira Levin’s novels were ever popular because truly, The Stepford Wives was sloppily written and often dull and I had to force myself to finish the book.
When I first heard that a remake/readaptation of The Stepford Wives was in the works, I was disgusted. I found the whole concept to be terribly dated. Did we really need another movie to explore the theme of uppity women being replaced by robots?
But then I heard that the 2004 movie (which I would consider both a re-adaptation of the book and a remake of the 1975 film) was going to be a dark comedy. That intrigued me. I didn’t see the movie in theaters, though, because I heard it was a failure, that the ending had been reshot and watered down, that it just didn’t work. It had a bad buzz, which seems to be standard for Frank Oz films, and which I believe is disguised anti-Muppet prejudice.
We rented The Stepford Wives on a whim last weekend. And you know what? It was a fun movie. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. There is nothing quite like the pleasant surprise of turning on a movie you expect to tolerate at best, wondering how long before you ask to turn off the movie or go into another room to read, and then you end up being sucked into the storyline and thoroughly enjoying yourself.
The storyline has of course changed from the book and the previous movie. In this version, Joanna is an ambitious network president who is fired (one of her new reality shows goes terribly wrong) and in order to save her marriage and her sanity, she and her husband decide to escape to the quiet retreat of Stepford, Connecticut. It turns out that Stepford has long been a refuge of high-powered wives and resentful inferior husbands, but thanks to the Men’s Association and its nefarious deeds, the women are all happy, pretty, vacuous little Stepford Wives now. (The scene in which they all get unduly excited over pinecone crafts is especially amusing.)
The Stepford Wives has a good script by Paul Rudnick (In and Out) with amusing dialogue, colorful characters, and a solid storyline. The filmmakers are aware that we all know the “twist” in the movie, so building up suspense for that particular revelation (woo! they’re robots!) wouldn’t work. The suspense is built over what’s going to happen to Joanna, and how. In the book, she doesn’t escape her fate. In the movie … well, it’s a little different. I appreciate remakes that change the plot around a bit so viewers of the original are still kept in suspense (like the recent remake of The Manchurian Candidate).
One variation on the original that has been discussed a lot is the inclusion of a gay couple in Stepford. I don’t know if this was done to make the story feel up-to-date, or to soften some of the gender division in the movie, or what. It doesn’t matter to me. It was just another fun element of a funny movie.
The casting of this movie is quite apt. I am not a big fan of Nicole Kidman or any of the other actors involved, but they fit into their roles perfectly. Jon Lovitz and Bette Midler made a hilarious couple. And the best casting of all was Christopher Walken as Mike, because any time Christopher Walken shows up, you know things are going to get strange. I am tempted to compare Glenn Close at the end of this movie to Meryl Streep in The Manchurian Candidate, and wonder what these roles say about women in 2004 films, but that’s for another day.
The fun of the movie does rely on a certain amount of gender stereotyping, which normally I dislike, but which works well in the context of this movie. The guys are all schlumpy nerds who were resentful of their wives’ successes, but one suspects that this type of guy was lured to Stepford for that reason, and it doesn’t mean all guys are like that. Really.
Despite everyone’s bad-mouthing, I thought Frank Oz did a fine job with this movie. He has a knack for dark comedy, as seen with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Little Shop of Horrors. But as I said about The Ladykillers, dark comedy does not appeal to a large number of people these days, and therefore these movies aren’t very popular. (I will refrain from a rant about the types of comedy films that are popular, and will simply note that the top box-office hit in the past three weeks has been Meet the Fockers.)
The DVD for The Stepford Wives includes some deleted and alternate scenes, most of which show the Stepford wives as being more unrealistically robotic. I suspect the much-publicized reshooting and re-editing was to downplay the more unrealistic elements of the women so that the changes made to them were more along the lines of reversible chip implants, etc. instead of their being killed and replaced by robots as they were in the original book and film. I think this was a good idea. The DVD also includes commentary by Frank Oz, which I am hoping to listen to before we have to return the DVD to the rental store … if I do, I’ll update this review to reflect that.
I am not sure I would have enjoyed The Stepford Wives in a theater as much as I enjoyed seeing it on DVD in my house, where my boyfriend and I could comment aloud on some of the sillier moments. It’s a good rental choice if you are in the mood for a nice little dark comedy. Just don’t read the book.