Film: The Stepford Wives

Frank Oz's re-make of The Stepford Wives offers the potential for the ultimate DVD experience. With all the re-shoots, re-writes and re-edits that occured in the making of the film you could include all the original footage and allow the viewer to create their own versions of the film. You could create a barbed relationship comedy, a kooky sci-fi film or a menacing horror film. In fact the hardest thing to do would be to create anything that was less coherent and engaging than the theatrical version, which should be called the random play edit.

Rarely has such a strong cast and a simple concept been so fudged and compromised. The mission statement must have been re-make The Stepford Wives and make it funny. In the current re-make happy cinema climate this is like shooting fish in a barrel with a daisy cutter bomb. However along the way someone decided to add scenes with attempts at emotional depth. You can easily spot them, they are the ones where you start looking around the cinema for people in the audience doing something vaguely more interesting than what is occurring on screen. Then someone managed to sneak in some of the darkness of the original story before a producer caught sight of what was happening and demanded the ultra-happy super fun ending and nothing that might upset people. This works fine, if you have the memory of a goldfish or don't mind a film abandoning it's entire plot to date with 20 minutes to go in order to have everyone smiling by the credits.

Yet in the fragmented mess of this film there are reminders that this is the writer and director who made the screamingly funny In And Out. The comic interplay between Nicole Kidman high powered TV exec, Bette Midler's neurotic writer and Roger Bart's left-over In And Out stereotype gay-guy. However they hardly share any scenes together. Early attempts to play up the absurdity of a town full of smiling bimbos never bloom either.

You may notice that I haven't referred to the plot yet. This is a deliberate reflection on a film which assumes you know what happens in the original and doesn't bother to explain anything. You leave the cinema struggling to remember what filled the running time. It's like watching 90 minutes of deleted scenes on a DVD, which for all we know it might be considering the amount of cock-ups that occurred during production. The end product bears about as much relation to a satisfying entity as the poster does to the film. The Stepford Wives don't have a secret, they don't even have a clue, and neither does anyone who involved in this film.