A friendship and film lacking in soul
”
The Women
”
starring Annette Bening, Meg Ryan, Debra Messing and Jada
Pinkett-Smith
It seems to be the summer of female friendship at the movies.
The season started in July with the long-awaited
”
Sex and the City
”
movie and continued with
”
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.
”
But it seems the latest foursome to hit the big screen just
can’t pull it off in
”
The Women.
”
A friendship and film lacking in soul
“The Women” starring Annette Bening, Meg Ryan, Debra Messing and Jada Pinkett-Smith
It seems to be the summer of female friendship at the movies. The season started in July with the long-awaited “Sex and the City” movie and continued with “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.” But it seems the latest foursome to hit the big screen just can’t pull it off in “The Women.”
What works in the other two films is that even though the four women, or teens in the case of “Traveling Pants,” have very different personalities and sometimes seem like they have little in common, they pull together when times are toughest. But in “The Women,” the characters seem to isloate themselves instead of talking out their troubles, which is really what a feel-good friendship movie is all about. In all fairness, “Sex and the City” had the advantage of a long-running TV series behind it so all the main characters were familiar to viewers from the opening credits. Ditto “Traveling Pants,” which is based on a young adult book series. So “The Women” had much more of a challenge in creating rich, socialite characters we might actually care about.
“The Women,” is based on a 1939 film by George Cukor, which was based on a play by Clare Boothe Luce. The film deals with divorce and betrayal, and was thought to be edgy for its time. But most interesting was Cukor’s decision to keep all the male characters off the screen. The stars of the film are Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, and Norma Shearer. As a sign of the times, however, most of the married ladies in the film are referred to as Mrs., followed by their husband’s name.
Diane English, who rewrote the screenplay for the modern age and directed the film, followed Cukor’s lead and left all the men off the screen. The result is that the male characters don’t seem flat like they did in “Sex and the City” because they are non-existent, but that doesn’t mean the female characters have more depth in this film.
In the film, Sylvia (Annette Bening) and Mary Haines (Meg Ryan) have been friends since college. Sylvia is a top editor at a fashion magazine, and Mary is spread too thin as a mother, charitable organizer and a wannabe fashion designer who is stuck working at her father’s company. Their circle of friends also includes Edie Cohen (Debra Messing), who can’t stop popping out babies, and Alex Fisher (Jada Pinkett Smith), a writer who is struggling to pen her next book.
The problem with this movie is that it never becomes very clear how these four very different women got to be friends in the first place, or more importantly, why they stay friends as their lives diverge.
Sylvia is the first to discover that Mary’s husband has been cheating. She overhears it from an over-talkative manicurist at Saks. Tanya (Debi Mazar) doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut, but Sylvia does. She chooses not to tell Mary of her husband’s infidelity, the first betrayal of her friend. Mary’s life crumbles as first her father fires her from her designer job and then she discovers her husband has been unfaithful with a perfume spritzer who works at Saks.
In “Love Actually,” when Karen (Emma Thompson) discovers her husband has likely cheated on her, the moment is quiet, but full of emotion as she listens to a Joni Mitchell song before pulling herself together to take her children to a school play. Karen is calm when she confronts her husband and kicks him to the curb. In the “The Women,” the scene where Mary first realizes her husband has cheated seems hollow, especially since there is no husband on screen for Mary to scream at, hurl things at or cry about. The only reason viewers know she is hurting is because she stops getting dressed and eats lots of M&Ms.
While Mary’s life is falling apart, Sylvia is struggling with her own problems as she trys to keep her magazine on the cutting edge for fear of losing her job. Sylvia is single and has no children, so her career really is her life, and when she feels it slipping away she takes drastic measures to keep it.
Edie and Alex barely figure into the movie after an opening scene and one in which the friends search out the perfume girl. The movie just doesn’t deliver characters that draw out emotion in viewers and while it probably works as a stage play or a 1939 ensemble film, the modern actresses didn’t pull it off.
