Moriarty

Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...

I don’t know how much or how little energy I have to discuss this movie, but let’s give it a try in case any of you are curious. I recognize that a Nora Ephron romantic comedy is hardly the sort of film that our most vocal readership would be interested in. We weren’t exactly your number-one source of YOU’VE GOT MAIL news while it was in production. Still, Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman in a high-profile remake/”reimagining” of a classic TV sitcom is a pretty big picture to just ignore altogether. Besides, as my wife and I count down the last few weeks before our due date, she’s pretty much determined to see anything in the theater she can, since she thinks it’s going to be a long time before she goes again. When the BEWITCHED pass arrived in the mail, there was no discussion. She called to RSVP herself and just told me when we would be going. Fair enough.

First up, the most obvious question is, “Does the comic show-within-a-film-about-a-show concept work?” And the answer is, “Nope. Pretty much doesn’t work at all.” Not that it’s badly written, per se, although the third act of the movie is utterly incomprehensible. It’s just that there’s no evident reason for them to have tied themselves in such complicated narrative knots. There’s no payoff to the updated concept. For those of you who haven’t really paid attention to any of the pre-release hype, let me try to explain the ultra-high-concept of the film for you in as succinct a fashion as possible: Ferrell plays Jack Wyatt, a movie star whose career is in the toilet after making a movie so bad that it didn’t sell a single copy on DVD. He agrees to star in an updated TV version of BEWITCHED, but he wants the emphasis of the show to be placed on Darren instead of Samantha. He wants an unknown co-star, someone he can easily overshadow. He unwittingly ends up asking a real witch, Isabel, played by Kidman, who is determined to live in the real world without using her powers at all. So she ends up playing Samantha, trying not to use her powers, but using them anyway, and she and Jack fall in love just like Samantha and Darren.

Sweet Lord, that’s a lot of work without a laugh.

That’s all just narrative set-up, legwork so that you can hopefully set up and pay off a bunch of jokes. And there is plenty of evidence of the Adam McKay script doctoring that took place when Ferrell signed on, mainly in certain lines or in specific bits of comic business. But the structure of the film is pure Ephron, and that’s the problem. This thing takes off like a lead balloon, despite desperately wanting to play as lighter-than-air romantic comedy. You can tell that Nicole Kidman’s game from the very first moment you see her in the movie. I think her gift as an actress is a very specific one. She manages to fully adapt to the particular tone that a director is trying to accomplish, which is why she seems to fit into a film even when the film doesn’t quite work. Kidman’s got to be close to 40 years old now, but somehow it seems totally natural for her to play Isabel as a girl, someone just now getting the itch for independence. She’s enormously appealing, even if the chemistry between her and her father Nigel (played by this summer’s busiest septuagenarian, Michael Caine) falls flat. There are some real sparks when she finally meets up with Jack, and it’s easy to see why he’s enchanted by her. She seems to be the one person in LA who isn’t trying to get into the film business, which actually makes it sort of funny that she’s rushed right into a position of stardom. She has so little sense of what’s normal that being the star of her own sitcom seems like just another job to her. Ephron surrounds Isabel with a couple of girlfriends she can bounce off of, and both Kristin Chenoweth and Heather Burns try their best to do something with these roles, but they’re basically cinematic parsley, just like Jason Schwartzman as Jack’s agent. Even the legendary Shirley MacLaine can barely squeeze any juice out of the part they handed her, and the way they reveal a specific bit of info about her character, then completely forget to wrap it up by the end of the film, smacks of last minute rewrites or massive amounts of footage having been dumped. In the end, the one thing that makes this a relatively painless misfire is the way Ferrell and Kidman play off one another. She seems so entertained by him and he seems so smitten with her that you find yourself lulled, almost buying into the stakes between the two of them. I know there were a few scenes where I started to think, “Oh, hey, this isn’t too bad”...

... and then WHAM! That Ephron touch just smacks you in the breadbasket all over again.

I think what’s most frustrating about a film like this is the idea that they overcomplicated things. It may not seem terribly “hip” to just make a straight adaptation of the TV show, but there’s something potent in there somewhere. For example, check out the Jimmy Stewart/Kim Novak film BELL, BOOK & CANDLE sometime if you don’t know it already. That’s basically the same idea as BEWITCHED, about a witch, complete with an eccentric family, who falls in love with a normal guy. The film manages to be genuinely sexy, especially for the time in which it was made, and it uses the witchcraft not as an excuse for silly sight gags or special effects, but as a metaphor. The TV version of BEWITCHED was a hit in the ‘60s because I think it tapped into the idea that men wanted their wives to stay at home and play traditional roles and subvert whatever power they had, even as they realized that things were changing and they weren’t going to be able to keep playing traditional roles anymore. When you take a high concept idea that already requires one leap of faith, and then you ladle on a bunch of other high-concept jibba jabba like this film does, you smother whatever there is that’s genuine about the idea. I can’t imagine what themes Ephron thinks her film addresses, or what she believes it’s about. Then again, this is a film where there are five full pages of press notes about Nicole Kidman’s costumes, so I don’t know if theme or character were very high on Ephron’s list when putting the movie together.

What really turned my indifference into indignation is the third act, which burns down any goodwill of any kind that might have been generated by that point. For one thing, anyone who not only wastes Steve Carrell, but who actually directs him to his first truly lousy screen performance, should have their DGA card taken away. I know he is trying to channel Paul Lynde. I get that. But his character makes absolutely no sense in any context. He appears out of nowhere, serves as Mr. Magic Exposition for a few minutes, then disappears again without even the most basic attempts at explanation. The business they give him to do is loud and frantic, but it’s never funny. At least Steven Colbert manages to be somewhat invisible during his brief screen time. I’m a big fan of Carrell’s, and all I can hope is that no one sees this movie so that no one holds this against him.

This is the sort of film where the technical credits are all as professional and as impressive as you could ever hope for, including John Lindley’s candy-colored cinematography and the production design by Neil Spisak, and the soundtrack is packed with songs like “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” and “Witchcraft” and “Witchy Woman,” all incredibly obvious choices that don’t really do much more than make the viewer go, “Oh, yeah, ‘cause that’s about a witch. Wow. That’s hilarious.” There’s only one song that gets used that surprised me, “And She Was” by Talking Heads, and it’s actually a nice marriage of music and image. It’s very brief, though. For the most part, no matter how hard the cast tries, no matter how slick the package is, this film can be summed up by one of the few good lines in the script, delivered by Shirley MacLaine as she describes movie stars: “Deep down, there is no deep down.”

Amen to that.