"The Stepford Wives"

Even Nicole Kidman can't save this brainless remake of the overrated '70s film. Robotic, retro wives are fine, but not even the creepiest husband has ever been aroused by a tiara.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Jun 11, 2004 | The 1975 picture "The Stepford Wives," based on Ira Levin's novel, was set in a seemingly perfect suburban community in which the men brought home the bacon while their wives, having been replaced by robots, waltzed around their spanking-clean kitchens in ruffled maxi dresses and floppy sunhats. The suggestion was that feminism and its concomitant thickets of armpit hair had threatened the natural order of things. Men longed for the old days, when women stayed at home and remained dewy-fresh, sexually submissive and properly granny-gowned at all times. The '60s were over, and even the possibly overrated pleasures of the sexual revolution had been forgotten: Time to be gettin' it on with Sunbonnet Sue.

The idea behind "The Stepford Wives" was screwy then, and it's screwy now. The notion of forcing the little lady to stay at home is used as an example of sinister male control. But look at the fringe benefits: a giant, comfortable house in Connecticut, the freedom to watch your children grow up instead of rushing off to work every day, enough money to feed and clothe them well -- sure doesn't look bad to me. Satirizing "The Stepford Wives" is pointless. But that hasn't stopped director Frank Oz ("In and Out," "Little Shop of Horrors") and writer Paul Rudnick ("In and Out," "Isn't She Great") from trying.

In the new "Stepford Wives," Nicole Kidman plays Joanna Eberhart, an immensely successful black-clad New York TV exec who has made a name for herself with reality shows that prove how infinitely superior women are to men, and how little they need them. But Joanna loses her job and suffers a nervous breakdown, after which her husband, Walter (Matthew Broderick), whisks her and their two kids off to the idyllic Connecticut town of Stepford in order to live a simpler, less stressful life. As the town's perkiest denizen, Claire Wellington (played by a highly shellacked and often very funny Glenn Close), explains brightly, Stepford has "no crime, no poverty and no pushing!"

But the town has a secret, and don't look now, but it's wearing a floral sundress: All the women of Stepford (an array of bland beauties, one of whom is the automaton country star Faith Hill) have figures like lithe cheerleaders and rarely leave the house without sporting either a prepster headband or a tiara. Their chief interests are bake sales and Christmas crafts, although they also find time to don mini-negligees for impromptu midday marital zugzug. Their mostly paunchy, ordinary-looking husbands, all of whom belong to the mysterious local Men's Association (which meets regularly in a swank manse outfitted with multiple TV screens for schizophrenic ESPN-grazing), stand by approvingly. (It doesn't appear that they ever go to work, either.)

Needless to say, Joanna, with her severe, dark-brown bob and her wardrobe of sleek midnight colors, doesn't fit in with this clan at all, and she quickly makes friends with the two other town misfits, also big-city transplants: Bobbie Markowitz (Bette Midler), who writes aggressive self-help books about coping with life's little troubles (sample title: "Wait Until He's Asleep, Then Cut It Off"), and Roger Bannister (Roger Bart), whose partner, Jerry (David Marshall Grant), has suddenly and mysteriously become a conservative Republican. The three of them have a grand old time taking potshots at the bubbleheads around them, patting themselves on the back for being hip and knowing enough to, say, make catty bulimia jokes -- apparently, living in the big city equips you with this kind of biting wit.

Next Page: And how come the husbands don't put their wives in hot stripper get-ups?

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