Caffeinated Clint
By Clint Morris
Hey Diane, why don’t you just have one of the actresses read out the script in front of a Borders bookstore audience? Probably be just as successful as the movie!
For a film that’s taken over a decade to get up – every actress in town has been attached to it at one point or another, I recall Julia Roberts being tied to the lead role at one stage, a part now played by Meg Ryan – Diane English’s remake of the classic play, and 1939 film ‘’The Women’’, was hardly worth the wait.
The main problem with the film isn’t that it plays like a watered down sexless version of Michael Patrick King’s “Sex and the City†movie – which it does, to an extent but it’s probably only perceptible because it’s released on the, er, heels of the latter – but more so the fact that it feels and plays like the play it’s based upon. Yes, the original source material is full of clever words and nifty sentences, but does it have to play so unnatural? There’s nothing here that even feels like a movie. It seems the all-star cast are too preoccupied trying to get their head…er mouths… around their dialogue to even bother immersing themselves in their respective on-screen characters.
Mary Haines (Meg Ryan) is a well-to-do clothing designer whose about to discover her husband is having an affair with a sexy ‘Saks Fith Avenue’ spritzer girl (Eva Mendes).
Her friends, namely best friend, Sylvie Fowler (Annette Bening), a happily single editor of a prominent fashion magazine – character reminded me a lot of Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones – try to help ease her pain, whilst questioning their own relationships and friendships.
Yep, all very “Sex and the City†… only not half as entertaining.
Plays can make good films – and some have been done so well that audiences still probably aren’t aware that they’re adaptations of something that originated on a pine stage. Take “A Few Good Menâ€, “Closerâ€, “The 24th Dayâ€, “Biloxi Bluesâ€, “The Woodsmanâ€, and “The Goodbye Girl†– all based on plays. Could you tell? Hell no. Everyone involved treated it as its own entity – a film. The script was tweaked to reflect it, the actors performed for it fully knowing what medium they were working in, and the director handled it like any other feature; he/she probably didn’t even go and see the original play, let alone watch an old VHS recording of it, before rolling film.
What English has done though is merely take the play and film it. Oh, she has had to expand on the locations – but that’s about it. Everything else plays out like the original stage show. You almost expect to see the camera pan back and reveal an audience at parts – or to hear a laugh or gasp from the audience – it feels that unauthentic. Nobody films their dress rehearsal.
Even if English had filmed it the same way, but just injected some purpose into the script, let alone pulled back on the fluff-o-meter, it might’ve been tolerable. In it’s current state, it’s hardly even watchable.
Skip it like you did Kenneth Branagh’s “Sleuthâ€.
