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The Women

You’ve got to admire their balls: a big, star-packed chick flick, and not a single male on screen (well, there is one, but you will have to wait for him to appear). It’s happened before. In 1939, George Cukor directed Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Paulette Goddard in an adaptation of the Clare Luce play written by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin.

The remake is written and directed by Diane English (Murphy Brown), and stars Meg Ryan as Mary Haines, the last to know that her husband (who is never seen) is having an affair with a sales assistant in the cosmetics department at Saks (Eva Mendes).

Her friends rally round: Sylvia (Annette Bening) is the editor of a women’s magazine – she wants to stop condescending to the reader, so naturally her job is on the line. Then there’s the earth-mother type with four kids and another on the way (Debra Messing). And what circle of cosmopolitan New York pals would be complete without the sexy black lesbian (Jada Pinkett Smith)?

This is obviously more of a Hilary crowd than a Palin set, but even so it’s hard to imagine how these women met, what drew them together or indeed what they might talk about when they’re not debating adulterous mates.

Despite their sympathies, Mary listens to her mom (Candice Bergen); an old fashioned sort who counsels discretion and a retreat to the summer cottage in Maine, on the theory that absence will make the heart grow fonder. (“What do you think this is, a 30s movies?” demands her daughter.) When that doesn’t work, and a chance encounter with sexy Eva in the lingerie department doesn’t persuade her to yield either, the scene is set for a bitter divorce, with a daughter and domestics as collateral damage and her friends wringing their hands on the sidelines. But it’s a perceived betrayal by Sylvia that really twists the knife in her heart…

This last development inevitably recalls Sex and the City, the movie – a comparison that would be inevitable in any case, given the dearth of chick flicks in general and the affluent New York society the two films’ have in common. (Mary’s husband is such a financial big cheese that their divorce is splattered all over the gossip columns.)

I didn’t rate Sex very highly and The Women is no better, though 85 percent of the audience I saw it with might disagree (I counted just half a dozen blokes in the sold out auditorium). The supposedly witty one liners are by and large feeble (Mary’s daughter’s tutor is Danish, “like the pastry”, ho ho) and English, who has never directed before, shows virtually no feel for blocking or rhythm. One of the first sequences involves Sylvia in Saks, presented as a subjective camera shot as it might appear in a videogame, with designer notes and tips appearing on screen. It’s as if the Terminator has been retooled shopping missions – but it’s such a cheap gag, undermining the character and the milieu; already you fear for the movie.

English is 60, which may be why the two actresses who stand out are octogenarian Cloris Leachman as Mary’s maid, and 62-year-old Candice Bergen. Both veterans deliver their lines with such aplomb you’re almost bound to laugh. Bening struggles to make her poorly written character amount to much, while Smith and Messing disappear entirely for long stretches.

Debi Mazar, Carrie Fisher and (inevitably) Bette Midler round out the cast.

As for Meg Ryan, she’s looking more comfortable in herself than she did in the Botox-panic era of In The Cut, and may revive her popularity with hairdressers for the killer ’do she sports when Mary finally gets her life straightened out, but there are only flashes of the daffy spunk that made her a rom-com queen nearly 20 years ago now.

Unlike Mary in the 1939 version, who was obsessed with getting her husband back), Mary 2008 sits back and composes a list: What I Want. Item one turns out to be designing her own fashion-line (we will note in passing that despite an earlier exchange about unrealistically skinny models and their impact on Mary’s teenage daughter, her own catwalking clothes horses are typically svelte).

The movie looks more expensive than its reported budget of $16.5 million, and despite its failings it does deliver some chuckles. Whether it also provides enough of a communal wallow to satisfy the target audience I don’t feel qualified to judge.

Tom Charity
tom.charty@lovefilm.com

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