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For The Stepford Wives, science is catching up with fiction. Ira Levin published his pseudo-feminist novel, in which a group of men swap their wives for look-alike robots, in 1972.
The book, and a 1975 film adaptation, spent more energy on gender politics than on man-machine issues – maybe because the idea of trading out humans for machines seemed far-fetched then.
Thirty years later, the concept doesn't sound so crazy – just ask assembly-line workers who have lost jobs to automation, or homemakers reliant on interactive refrigerators and vacuum cleaners. So the time seems right for an updated Stepford Wives, one that would illuminate the increasingly charged relationship between humans and machines.
Unfortunately, the new Stepford Wives in theaters this week is not that film. This frothy, sitcom-inflected piece of camp is more Birdcage than AI. What does it tell us about technology and humanity? Or about gender relations? Just about nothing. As a comedy, it has its moments, but the filmmakers, including director Frank Oz and screenwriter Paul Rudnick, sidestep the meaty material the book suggested.
The new Stepford Wives follows TV executive Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman), who is fired after a disgruntled reality show contestant goes on a killing spree. One nervous breakdown later, she agrees to move to Stepford, Connecticut, a bedroom community filled with dweebish men and their buxom, perfectly coifed, housework-obsessed spouses.
Stepford seems too perfect for the suspicious Joanna – the women seem to have emerged from '50s soap commercials – so she and two oddball friends, the slobby, sharp-tongued novelist Bobbi Markowitz (Bette Midler) and the flamboyant gay architect Roger Bannister (Roger Bart), begin investigating. Their suspicions lead them to the local men's club, which, it turns out, has an automaton factory in the basement.
The Stepford Wives plays like a satire, but it's a befuddled one. What, exactly, is it sending up? The original film? If so, who cares? Suburban life? Too soft a target. Modern marriage? Well, what's it trying to say? TV culture? Its spoofs are barely more outrageous than reality.
Other possible targets – advertising, gay marriage, racial tensions – are completely avoided. The film takes a few pokes at electoral politics (Roger is robotized into a smooth-talking candidate) and at high-tech companies. "Where do you work?" Joanna asks one husband. "AOL," he answers. "No wonder you're so slow," she says. That's as topical as the film gets.
As far as Stepford's science, the filmmakers don't know what to make of it. There are some cheap, mad-scientist-style effects and an opening montage featuring women swooning erotically over their domestic machines. But at the film's messy end, we are told that the best reason to prefer humans to machines is that humans make mistakes, an idiotic thesis even for an idiotic movie.
The mystery in the first Stepford film revolved around Stepford's women. What was happening to these independent-thinking people? Who was responsible? In the remake, any narrative tension and horror evaporate from the beginning. There's nothing creepy and nothing frightening in this film. Plus, it makes no sense.
Though The Stepford Wives is off the rails, it also has some gleeful, madcap moments. The original movie took itself far too seriously, and this one isn't serious at all. The biggest laughs come courtesy of Roger Bart's character – his bitchy one-liners belong in a better movie. Jon Lovitz and Glenn Close also have their moments.
Those who feel like forcing The Stepford Wives to do some cultural work might trace the distance between the first film and the remake. In the first, the central character is a modestly talented would-be art photographer; in the second, she's a high-powered exec. The husband, originally a lawyer, is now his wife's gofer.
And the original film's writer, the legendary Hollywood script doctor William Goldman, has been replaced by Rudnick, a gay humorist best known for his script for In and Out and satiric essays in The New Yorker and Premiere.
All steps forward toward a healthy pluralism, perhaps. But machines have made progress, too, and Stepford is, after all, about robots. Can't we hear something about them?
