The Women

Review by Clint Morris
More Reviews: The Women

Dear Diane English,

Why don't you just have one of the actresses read out the script for "The Women" in front of a Borders bookstore audience? It would probably be just as successful as the movie!

Regards
Disgruntled Movie Fan

For a film that has 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) Diane English's remake of the classic play and 1939 film, The Women... and to be honest, it was hardly worth the wait.

The main problem with the film isn't that it plays like a watered down, sexless version of the Sex and the City movie (which it does, to an extent but it is probably only perceptible because it has been released on the, er, heels of the latter) but more so the fact that it feels and plays like the play it is based upon.

Yes, the original source material is full of clever words and nifty sentences, but does it have to play out so unnaturally?

There is nothing here that even feels like a movie. It seems like the all-star cast are too preoccupied trying to get their head… and, 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), is a happily single editor of a prominent fashion magazine (a character which reminded me  of Kim Cattrall's Samantha Jones) trying to help ease her pain, whilst questioning their own relationships and friendships.

Yep, all very Sex and the City … only, not even half as entertaining.

Stage plays can make good films – and some have been done so well that audiences still probably aren't even aware that they are adaptations of something that originated on a pine stage.

Take A Few Good Men, Closer, A Clockwork Orange, Biloxi Blues, The Woodsman, 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 Diane English has done is merely take the play and film it.

Oh, she has had to expand on the locations – but that is 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 have been tolerable. In it's current state, The Women is hardly even watchable.

Skip it like you did Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth.

1 out of 5

The Women
Australian release: 23rd October, 2008
Official Site: The Women
Cast: Meg Ryan, Debra Messing, Annette Bening,Jada Pinkett Smith, Eva Mendes 
Director: Diane English