Review: "The Women"

At one point in Diane English’s debut film “The Women” (based on a 1939 film adaptation of Clare Booth Luce’s 1936 play), Sylvia (Annette Bening) explains why she’s not interested in marriage: “I am the man I want to marry.” Out of context, such a line would seem to make this movie a promising contribution to this blog’s main query—what if we were to detach the role of wife (or husband for that matter) from the institution of marriage? Could such carefully policed gender roles be peacefully elaborated beyond our culture of heteronormativity and the marriage imperative? This film says decisively, “no.” The heroine Mary Haines (Meg Ryan) discovers her wealthy stockbroker husband is having an affair with a Saks perfume “spritzer girl,” Crystal (Eva Mendes). On the advice of her mother (Candace Bergen), Mary initially decides to play it down, to visit the family beach house in Maine with her 13-year-old daughter rather than confront her husband. Later on, after the inevitable confrontation occurs, Mary uses her fury over this betrayal to fuel what turns out to be a simplistic journey to self-realization. Aided by the sage advice of Bette Midler’s character (whose near-cameo function was ruined for this old fan of the "Beaches" soundtrack by an offensively bad hairdo), “be selfish,” Mary farts out a line of her own fashion designs, which of course turns out to be an overwhelming success. The risk that launches her hip new career proves all too sexy and appealing to her estranged husband and he begs for a second chance. The message seems to be: find a self for yourself and you’ll find yourself a spouse too.

The film is full of exasperating messages about "Women": we are interested only in shopping and manicures, charity and romance, gossip and cat-fighting. We are wealthy enough to support all these habits. Mary's 13-year-old daughter insists that she is fat, refuses to eat a cookie, and smokes cigarettes to kill her appetite. When this pint-sized Pandora confronts her mother's best friend Sylvia about the starving models featured each month in the fashion magazine she edits, Sylvia shrugs off the hypocrisy, telling the girl something vapid like "life's complicated darling." Pandora's box turns out to be a vacuum; one wonders why the writers even tried to go there. In fact the entire film appears to have been made in the spirit of patriarchal capitalism--empowering its female protagonists only enough to oppress other women by convincing them to consume (i.e. shop) and not to consume (i.e. eat): Sylvia runs the fashion magazine, Jada Pinkett-Smith's totally unconvincing lesbian character dates an emaciated supermodel who's angry because she's so hungry, and Mary designs a line of dresses which appear to be sized in the negatives judging from the models on the runway at her debut fashion show.

While the film is just another repetition of the marriage imperative (even Sylvia—who could have been her own husband—has met a man by the end of the film), it is also pretty unsatisfyingly normative about marital affairs. Any deviations from “blissful” monogamy, like Steven Haines’ affair with Crystal the perfume girl, are forgiven in the end. It turns out everyone has been cheated on, and that it’s OK. In a surprise twist at the end, Debra Messing’s overly fertile character Edie Cohen (the scene takes place while she’s giving birth to her fifth child) reveals that she had an affair on her husband sometime in between the second and third baby, and he forgave her too. It took some time, she assures her best friends in between pushes, but he got over it. It is true: marital affairs are so common that they should not merit threats of presidential impeachment, and it is also true that affairs do not always signal the end of a marriage. But in a film that wants so badly to be a paean to female friendship, a celebration of a Rosie-esque “We Can Do It” trope of self-empowerment, why be so approving of affairs? Is it possible that by norming the marital affair—announcing its acceptability as the form of deviation from heterosexual monogamy—other alternatives to heterosexual monogamy are once again firmly marginalized, if not demonized? The film seems only superficially to dwell on the real question of whether Mary should forgive her husband. We never meet him. In fact, those crafty writers made Steven Haines out to be the victim of the conniving Eva Mendes (who looks terrific in lingerie, as is to be expected). She’s hunted him down like a lion chases prey on the African veldt (and it is no mistake that they chose a Latina and dressed her up in leopard print Manolos to represent “the hussy,” right?). The close of the film takes one final stab at Crystal the mistress—by turning her into a lesbian. The message, to me anyway, is clear. And my message to you is skip this movie altogether. It may have been topical in 1939, when some high society ladies may have required Luce’s lucid analysis, or at least a little of the “right-hand ring” business, but not anymore. We know we can do it, the question is, will we?