“Desecration! Travesty!” I’d cry were it not for the fact that the original Stepford Wives has never itself been considered a great film. The creepy 1975 mixture of Rosemary’s Baby, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Betty Freidan has endured less because of its cinematic achievement than for the lasting contribution of its premise to the collective conscience. The utterance “Stepford” has come to signify an oppressive domesticity: the horrors of suburban homogeny and those infamous 2.5 kids. What did work for the original film (starring Katharine Ross as Joanna, a wife and mother new to idyllic Stepford, CT who uncovers—albeit a bit too late—the plot of the Stepford Men’s Association to turn the town’s women into man-serving automatons) was its layering of social satire just beneath the surface of what was manifestly a horror film. Although the humor and camp of the original Stepford certainly never strayed far beneath this surface, the film’s frequently deft handling of social commentary was all the more delicious when delivered amidst the ostensible earnestness of horror flick conventions. When Joanna and friend Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) investigate why none of the Stepford wives appear interested in forming a Women’s group, one wife in particular reasons, “I simply haven’t the time…what with all the baking.” Such a moment works so beautifully precisely because humor was not necessarily what we were expecting.

In contrast, DreamWorks’ latest Stepford Wives “upgrade” wants you to know in no uncertain terms that it is a “comic reimagining of the suspense classic.”* It’s opening title sequence winks wryly at us through images of feminine domesticity and Fifties-era labor-saving gadgetry—the same old critique of the period modern Hollywood seems to find inexhaustibly clever. Just in case you’ve still not donned your ha-ha hat, Frank Oz’s glossy, overscored mise-en-scène gently whispers “THIS IS A PARODY” for the next 90 some minutes. Yet what, exactly, is being parodied is never precisely determined.

In what appears to be the latest twist on Hollywood’s incessant penchant for remaking proven properties, originality is promised through a shift in genre. Self-parody is not new to Hollywood. What does seem new is that the send-up should share the same title as the original (as in Starsky and Hutch, released earlier this year). In the case of The Stepford Wives, the result of the experiment is predictably lifeless. Bringing the aforementioned latent humor of the original to the surface amounts to an attempted bludgeoning with bad jokes. Most of the humor found in the film was not only present in its precursor, but smarter because implicit. The new Stepford villain explains, “I found a place where no one would notice a town of robots: Connecticut”, spelling out for us a nearly thirty-year-old joke tacitly contained in the very premise of the original film. Attempts at more “contemporary” humor perish beneath the weight of presumed cleverness. Witness: “Wanting to be a gay Republican is like wanting to be gay with a bad haircut.” With remakes like these, who needs originals?

As noted earlier, this ideologically confused lampoon seems unsure of its target. Nicole Kidman’s Joanna has “made it.” In contrast to Ross’s Joanna—struggling against male oppression in order to ascend from amateur shutterbug to career photographer—Kidman’s top television network exec proves we’ve come along way, maybe. Joanna is now painted as workaholic career bitch (recalling Kidman’s superior turn in To Die For) whose most recent insensitive reality TV offering has prompted an attempt on her life by a disgruntled male “contestant.” In the opening of the film we’re shown clips of Joanna’s shows “I Can Do Better” and “Balance of Power,” which establish the film’s motif of the battle of the sexes. The not-so-subtle suggestion is that women today have not only gained equal footing on this battleground but are typically more adept at grasping the upper hand. Joanna, needing to be taken down a peg or two, is consequently fired from the network, prompting her and husband Walter’s (Matthew Broderick) move to Stepford. By alternating between the “clash of the sexes” motif, which never really finds resonance, and the cookie-cutter subservience of the titular homemakers, the film’s satire is schizophrenic. Are we condemning Leona Helmsley or Betty Crocker (recently unified in the persona of Martha Stewart)?

“Ideologically confused” may in fact be too generous; if the original film was something of a feminist diatribe, the undercurrent of Stepford 2.0 is plainly reactionary, though to say that it is so intentionally may again be granting it too much credit. The film follows the plot of the original fairly closely, yet departs from it in a tacked-on climax that feels contrived under pressure to offer something new. Here it is revealed that the true villain behind the Stepford wives is not the Christopher Walken character, but one of the wives herself, Claire Wellington (Glenn Close). It is women, after all, who really wish to be controlled by men. Conclusions such as this are the (hopefully) inadvertent byproducts of a film stabbing in the dark for satirical targets. In the spirit of this randomness the film needlessly takes on the zeitgeist with shots at reality TV, Prozac nation, and gay chic: social commentary better handled by the most mediocre episodes of The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. Needless to say, the talents of Ms. Kidman, et al, are wasted. The ever-watchable Walken threatens at times to entertain, but is never really given the right opportunity.

Ultimately The Stepford Wives 2004 illustrates what happens when having profits to make is too highly prioritized over having something to say. At the end of the film, there is a scene in which the husbands of Stepford are imprisoned in a supermarket, inverting the famous ending scene of the 1975 original. These images offer a glimpse of what might have been, if only the creators of the film had embraced their reactionary impulses: “The Stepford Husbands” might have justified both the shift to parody and a return to the material. Instead, The Stepford Wives attempts to have the best of all worlds. Unfortunately, none of them are funny.
—BRAD WESTCOTT

*from http://www.stepfordwivesmovie.com/