kitty
06-16-2004, 02:08 PM
Stepford Wives a Step in the Wrong Direction
If last year was the year of comic book adaptations and bad sequels, this year is definitely the year of the old 70's remakes. One of the first films that has been given the post-millenium treatment is the Stepford Wives, a screenplay based on the book by the same name, written by Ira Levin. It is a psychological thriller with an extremely timely commentary on the feminist movement of its era.
Thus, to discuss the 2004 remake of the Stepford Wives, starring Nicole Kidman and Bette Midler, is to necessarily first discuss the original upon which this modernized version was based.
At this point, I suggest that anyone who has neither seen the original film, nor does not know what a 'Stepford wife' is, STOP READING IMMEDIATELY. This review will go into a great deal of summary in order to place the film in the proper sociopolitical context, and, trust me, you don't want to have the surprise ending of the original movie ruined for you.
You have now been properly warned.
After the first Stepford Wives, which aired in 1975 and starred Katherine Ross as main protagonist Joanna Eberhart, the term 'Stepford Wives' became a household name, a slang word used to describe the willingly subservient, aritifical, one-dimensional and flat characters of the Stepford Wives. Having recently seen the original, the commentary is still significant and relevant to today's world of up-and-coming, independent career women.
The Stepford Wives (1975) follows the story of Joanna Eberhart, a stay-at-home mother pursuing a budding career as a photographer. She is married to husband, Walter (Peter Masterson), a well-to-do businessman, and has two wild children and a dog. In fact, the Eberhart family is a veritable poster child for upper crust WASP-ness. As the film opens, Peter whisks his family out of Manhattan, against Joanna's wishes, to a small town outside the city called Stepford. It is a picture-perfect suburb, with each family living in huge Victorian-style country houses, complete with perfectly manicured lawns full of blooming flowers. There is no crime in Stepford, no poverty, and no minorities. Joanna finds herself turning into a bored and bitter housewife, and feels distinctly distant from the other Stepford women, all doting and caring wives whose interests lie only in housework and other domestic chores -- Joanna finds she has no one with whom to speak politics or to even gossip with. Furthermore, Joanna feels inadequate when she compares herself to her hyper-feminized peers: her hatred of housework has resulted in her house being dusty and somewhat junky (though nothing in comparison to her sole friend in Stepford, the spunky and loudmouthed Bobbie Markow (Paula Prentiss), whose house is filthy because Bobbie is an abject failure when it comes to the domestic sphere, and her and her husband's marriage has suffered in part as a result). Joanna has little to no control over her children, and spends most of her time pursuing her photography and even trying to befriend the other Stepford women, in an effort to bring them out of their shells. Meanwhile, Walter begins to act oddly, frequenting the Stepford Men's Association, of which all of the Stepford men are a part. Eventually, Joanna deduces that there is something wrong with the Stepford women, and when Bobbie too transforms into a Stepford wife, Joanna comes to the horrific realization that the Men's Association has developed androids to be their perfect wives, and have secretly murdered all of the women in Stepford and replaced them with these robots. Significantly, it is not the men who do the killing, but the robots, themselves; an android's first deadly task upon activation is to murder the woman who it was to replace.
The Stepford Wives (1975) is a direct response to the feminist movement of the 1960's and early 1970's, which itself was rallying against centuries of unfair treatment of women. It was a revolution against June Cleaver that culminated in the attempted passing of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which explicitly demanded that the 'equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex'. Though the suffrage movement culminated in victory following the passing of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, women were still subjected to significant gender discrimination, especially in the workforce. Culturally, women were still expected to be masters of the domestic sphere. To counter this, the feminist movement worked busily to try and have the ERA passed, and the bulk of this activity took place around the time of the Stepford Wives.
Levin's novel was viewed as a cautionary tale of the danger of a hyper-masculinized society, an extremist look at the contemporary gender politics of his time. He saw men as trying to force women into the role of live sex dolls -- the Stepford wives were frightening not only because of their murderous origins, but because they were portrayed as the ideal woman in every way -- prettier and dumber than real life, always busy with housework, and eager to stroke the tender egos of their male keepers. It was terrifying also to imagine the possibility of such a town -- that women were in such a state in American society that an entire town could be populated with artificial fem-bots, so subservient as to seem unrealistic, and yet to have no one notice.
Yet, by contrast, protagonists Joanna and Bobbie are a far cry from the bra-burning feminists that came to stereotype the women's movement of the time, but were housewives seeking only to be considered equals to their husbands. In fact, by today's standards, they would be seen as living by an antiquted code -- they are housewives without any real careers (Joanna's photography is not very successful) and who are trapped in financially and emotionally dependent marriages. When faced with the dangers of Stepford, they first doubt their own mental states, and even when they are convinced that there is a real threat to their well-being, can do little more than fluster around hysterically rather than take proactive measures to guarantee their safety. Even when the supposedly well-educated and intellectually enlightened Joanna decides to bring up the level of discussion among the Stepford women in an attempt to break them out of their domesticity and attachment to their husbands, all she does is start a book club. Levin warns, thus, that even the desire to be seen as equal is not enough -- masculine society is primarily interested in its own survival. As John Adams wrote to his wife after she asked him to provide some protection for women in the Constitution, "... we know better than to repeal our masculine system" (Letter, April 14, 1776 from Alice Rossi's 'From Adams to de Beauvoir', New York, Columbia University Press, 1973). Men feared the women's movement because they knew they were in a position of privilege, and would do anything to retain that position.
But it was not men who would ultimately destroy the women's movement; instead Levin suggests that it is the women who, themselves, prefer to remain subjugated under the oppression of gender discrimination, who would bring down the Equal Rights Amendment (as was subsequently proven to be the case, since many of the ERA's greatest opponents were right-wing women like Phyllis Schlafly who argued that the ERA would send women to war, deny them financial support from their husbands, and lead to the legalization of abortion and homosexual marriages). As I mentioned earlier, Joanna was merely lead to her death by her husband and the Men's Association -- it is the hyper-feminized Stepford wife who ultimately kills her.
The Stepford Wives (1975) is still highly relevant to today's society, especially considering that the Equal Right Amendment has yet to be passed and women still face problems of gender discrimination, unequal payment, and other forms of inequality. It also pointed out the flaws of the women's movement (intentionally or unintentionally) since it appealed to uppercrust white women as the primary audience for this film -- indeed the women's movement has been seen largely as a white women's movement, born out of the same women that made Joanna and Bobbie: rich Caucasian women who had nothing to do to fill their days. Minority women of colour were often in the poor classes of society and were preoccupied with racial rather than gender discrimination, and thus their issues were never really addressed by proponents of the ERA. They were Joanna and Bobbie's maids, cleaning up after them and caring for their children, while Joanna and Bobbie were off demanding equal protection, as is still largely true today. When I watched the Stepford Wives (1975), I was profoundly touched by its message -- depressingly, the women of the 1970's don't look or act all that different from today's women.
Why then would we need a remake? Admittedly, I did not watch the original Stepford Wives until I saw a trailer for the 2004 revival; in fact, I hadn't even heard of it until then. It seems that 30 odd years is enough time for even such a revolutionary film to pass out of popular recollection, especially among the MTV generation who, like myself, can't remember a thing past those old school Transformers cartoons we used to watch. Like the push to Americanize good Asian horror filmes, Hollywood seems to feel that the MTV generation won't watch a film if the quality is of a certain kind of gritty, or if they can't recognize at least one of the stars in the movie.
From the beginning, The Stepford Wives (2004) was doomed, particularly with rumours of dissension among the cast and the high-profile quitting of John and Joan Cusack midway through production, who were slated to play Joanna Eberhard's (Nicole Kidman) husband, Walter Kresby, and her friend in Stepford, Bobbie Markowitz, respectively. Instead, Walter was played by Matthew Broderick who, by sheer aesthetics alone, was a poor match for Nicole Kidman. She is showing her age at 36, and Broderick at 43, looks about 28. Their onscreen match not only lacked chemistry but seemed eerily pedophilic, and his physical youthfulness only accentuated her increasing years. A far cry from the Walter of the 1975 film, Broderick played his role (as he plays all roles) with a schoolboy impishness, that made him seem more like a deer in the headlights than the conniving, political men of the original.
In one of the many attempts to modernize and diversify the film, Bette Midler's character had an -itz tacked on to the end of her name, and was turned into a Jewish Stepford wife. Midler, while her usual funny sarcastic self, played the same character she has played throughout the past two decades -- the slightly overweight, frumpy, embittered Jewish mom, a veritable reincarnation of her role in the First Wives Club. Part of Midler's Stepfordization was to (apparently) drop her Jewishness and become platinum blonde, which was, at least in part, a return to the 'real' meaning of Stepford wives. (As an aside, Oz spends a significant amount of time on a scene in which Joanna attends the women's book club making fun of Midler's Jewishness in a sea of WASP-yness; so much so that it leaves social commentary and a cheap laugh behind, and borders on offensiveness). However, for the most part, director Frank Oz (possibly best known as the voice of Yoda in the Star Wars prequels, though he also directed In 'n Out, which was actually good and, y'know, funny) seemed to be looking to turn the term 'Stepford' into a generic word for 'anti-feminist', ignoring all the racial, and indeed gender, connotations behind its original implications. For example, while it is an interesting exercise, the feminist commentary is lost when Oz attempts to introduce the 'gay Stepford partner' who, originally an effeminate, 'flaming' architect, is turned into ... a gay republican.
Nicole Kidman herself seems out of place in this film, and if she has acting talent, she didn't waste a drop of it here. She waltzes her way through the scenes on name recognition alone, barely eking out any fear or suspense when Joanna begins to suspect that all is not as it seems in Stepford. Whether a poor choice by the screenplay writer or the director, or poor acting on Kidman's part, Joanna spends most of her time trying to emulate the Stepford women, hoping that she can transform herself from the 'career bitch' she was in Manhattan to a well-adjusted suburbanite housewife. Her eventual actual transformation into a Stepford wife is so poorly done that there's little difference (other than the platinum blonde hair) in behaviour between the real Joanna and the Stepford Joanna. Meanwhile, if one were to start to believe that anything can be made better with a dash of Christopher Walken, those illusions were shattered in this film. Though there was nothing wrong, per se, with Walken in this role as Mike Wellington, the leader of the Stepford Men's association, he seems about as bored in this film as Midler is; he did more acting in the Fatboy Slim music video in which all he was asked to do was dance.
Perhaps the person who I most questioned their sanity when they signed on to this film, however, was Glenn Close. I have a fair amount of respect for Close, and I have to wonder what she was thinking when she decided to play Claire Wellington. The role itself was quite fun, and for the most part, she was a welcome bit of comic relief, but perhaps she had spilled coffee on the last twenty or so pages of the script she was sent? The ending that screenwriter Paul Ruddnick (In 'n Out) crazy glued to the film in order to 'twist the twist ending' was campy, cheesy, inane, incoherent, and thoroughly horrible, ultimately cheapening the whole point of 'Stepfordization' and the motivation behind the men who created such a place. While the idea that it is women who prefer subjugation who doom feminism is still intact, Ruddnick turns a dark satire into a comedic happy ending which seems thoroughly out of place and insignificant. A film about the perils of unequal treatment cannot end with the bad guys getting their just desserts -- it diminishes the relevance and social commentary of the message and relegates the entire story to fairy tale status.
Technically, the film is full of holes, and not just the kind that one would only see if searching with a fine-toothed comb. Initially, we are lead to believe that the Stepford wives in the 2004 remake, like their predecessors, are robots and, as we see in the trailer, Joanna is eventually confronted with an android counterpart. And yet, two thirds of the way through the movie, Oz backtracks and decides that the women really have become Stepfordized through implantation of chips in their brains. Yet, scenes of Stepford women doing things only robots could do are still left in the movie. Furthermore, while In 'n Out was a witty and comical look at the process of coming out, the script for the Stepford Wives (2004) was about as flat as a Stepford personality. Dialogue is unconvincing, the comedy is of a slapstick nature and rather banal, motivations are unclear, and all the secondary characters (particularly the Stepford men) seem to have been shorthanded in the script as "men: <insert line>" resulting in an aggravating (and thoroughly unrealistic) tendancy for the men to speak in unison or to act as clamouring yes-men to Mike Wellington's lead.
Unlike in the Stepford Wives (1975) film, in which the concept of replacing all the women with robots is not revealed until the very end, creating a wonderful twist ending, Oz doesn't even try to conceal the fact that robots populate Stepford. If he were planning on resurrecting the film, he had to deal with the fact that the cat was let out of the proverbial bag, and yet rather than either attempt to truly cater to a modern audience that had, most likely, never seen the original, and stick with this ending, he set the film up as if the audience would already know about Stepfordization. It was even, irritatingly enough, in the trailer -- thoroughly ruining the exciting allure of the 1975 original. In fact, Oz carefully and surgically excised any social commentary that could've been found in the 1975 film, leaving nothing but a fast spreading mess on one and a half hours of wasted film.
When I try to think back at what, if anything, was good about the Stepford Wives (2004), I come up short. (I can say that I liked the opening credits, which featured footage of 1950's women and model kitchens of futuristic houses, marvelling over kitchen appliances.) I can only argue that, if there was a positive aspect to the movie, it would be that I hope the publicity from the 2004 remake will encourage everyone to go back and see the 1975 original, a truly outstanding piece of film and commentary.
If last year was the year of comic book adaptations and bad sequels, this year is definitely the year of the old 70's remakes. One of the first films that has been given the post-millenium treatment is the Stepford Wives, a screenplay based on the book by the same name, written by Ira Levin. It is a psychological thriller with an extremely timely commentary on the feminist movement of its era.
Thus, to discuss the 2004 remake of the Stepford Wives, starring Nicole Kidman and Bette Midler, is to necessarily first discuss the original upon which this modernized version was based.
At this point, I suggest that anyone who has neither seen the original film, nor does not know what a 'Stepford wife' is, STOP READING IMMEDIATELY. This review will go into a great deal of summary in order to place the film in the proper sociopolitical context, and, trust me, you don't want to have the surprise ending of the original movie ruined for you.
You have now been properly warned.
After the first Stepford Wives, which aired in 1975 and starred Katherine Ross as main protagonist Joanna Eberhart, the term 'Stepford Wives' became a household name, a slang word used to describe the willingly subservient, aritifical, one-dimensional and flat characters of the Stepford Wives. Having recently seen the original, the commentary is still significant and relevant to today's world of up-and-coming, independent career women.
The Stepford Wives (1975) follows the story of Joanna Eberhart, a stay-at-home mother pursuing a budding career as a photographer. She is married to husband, Walter (Peter Masterson), a well-to-do businessman, and has two wild children and a dog. In fact, the Eberhart family is a veritable poster child for upper crust WASP-ness. As the film opens, Peter whisks his family out of Manhattan, against Joanna's wishes, to a small town outside the city called Stepford. It is a picture-perfect suburb, with each family living in huge Victorian-style country houses, complete with perfectly manicured lawns full of blooming flowers. There is no crime in Stepford, no poverty, and no minorities. Joanna finds herself turning into a bored and bitter housewife, and feels distinctly distant from the other Stepford women, all doting and caring wives whose interests lie only in housework and other domestic chores -- Joanna finds she has no one with whom to speak politics or to even gossip with. Furthermore, Joanna feels inadequate when she compares herself to her hyper-feminized peers: her hatred of housework has resulted in her house being dusty and somewhat junky (though nothing in comparison to her sole friend in Stepford, the spunky and loudmouthed Bobbie Markow (Paula Prentiss), whose house is filthy because Bobbie is an abject failure when it comes to the domestic sphere, and her and her husband's marriage has suffered in part as a result). Joanna has little to no control over her children, and spends most of her time pursuing her photography and even trying to befriend the other Stepford women, in an effort to bring them out of their shells. Meanwhile, Walter begins to act oddly, frequenting the Stepford Men's Association, of which all of the Stepford men are a part. Eventually, Joanna deduces that there is something wrong with the Stepford women, and when Bobbie too transforms into a Stepford wife, Joanna comes to the horrific realization that the Men's Association has developed androids to be their perfect wives, and have secretly murdered all of the women in Stepford and replaced them with these robots. Significantly, it is not the men who do the killing, but the robots, themselves; an android's first deadly task upon activation is to murder the woman who it was to replace.
The Stepford Wives (1975) is a direct response to the feminist movement of the 1960's and early 1970's, which itself was rallying against centuries of unfair treatment of women. It was a revolution against June Cleaver that culminated in the attempted passing of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which explicitly demanded that the 'equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex'. Though the suffrage movement culminated in victory following the passing of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, women were still subjected to significant gender discrimination, especially in the workforce. Culturally, women were still expected to be masters of the domestic sphere. To counter this, the feminist movement worked busily to try and have the ERA passed, and the bulk of this activity took place around the time of the Stepford Wives.
Levin's novel was viewed as a cautionary tale of the danger of a hyper-masculinized society, an extremist look at the contemporary gender politics of his time. He saw men as trying to force women into the role of live sex dolls -- the Stepford wives were frightening not only because of their murderous origins, but because they were portrayed as the ideal woman in every way -- prettier and dumber than real life, always busy with housework, and eager to stroke the tender egos of their male keepers. It was terrifying also to imagine the possibility of such a town -- that women were in such a state in American society that an entire town could be populated with artificial fem-bots, so subservient as to seem unrealistic, and yet to have no one notice.
Yet, by contrast, protagonists Joanna and Bobbie are a far cry from the bra-burning feminists that came to stereotype the women's movement of the time, but were housewives seeking only to be considered equals to their husbands. In fact, by today's standards, they would be seen as living by an antiquted code -- they are housewives without any real careers (Joanna's photography is not very successful) and who are trapped in financially and emotionally dependent marriages. When faced with the dangers of Stepford, they first doubt their own mental states, and even when they are convinced that there is a real threat to their well-being, can do little more than fluster around hysterically rather than take proactive measures to guarantee their safety. Even when the supposedly well-educated and intellectually enlightened Joanna decides to bring up the level of discussion among the Stepford women in an attempt to break them out of their domesticity and attachment to their husbands, all she does is start a book club. Levin warns, thus, that even the desire to be seen as equal is not enough -- masculine society is primarily interested in its own survival. As John Adams wrote to his wife after she asked him to provide some protection for women in the Constitution, "... we know better than to repeal our masculine system" (Letter, April 14, 1776 from Alice Rossi's 'From Adams to de Beauvoir', New York, Columbia University Press, 1973). Men feared the women's movement because they knew they were in a position of privilege, and would do anything to retain that position.
But it was not men who would ultimately destroy the women's movement; instead Levin suggests that it is the women who, themselves, prefer to remain subjugated under the oppression of gender discrimination, who would bring down the Equal Rights Amendment (as was subsequently proven to be the case, since many of the ERA's greatest opponents were right-wing women like Phyllis Schlafly who argued that the ERA would send women to war, deny them financial support from their husbands, and lead to the legalization of abortion and homosexual marriages). As I mentioned earlier, Joanna was merely lead to her death by her husband and the Men's Association -- it is the hyper-feminized Stepford wife who ultimately kills her.
The Stepford Wives (1975) is still highly relevant to today's society, especially considering that the Equal Right Amendment has yet to be passed and women still face problems of gender discrimination, unequal payment, and other forms of inequality. It also pointed out the flaws of the women's movement (intentionally or unintentionally) since it appealed to uppercrust white women as the primary audience for this film -- indeed the women's movement has been seen largely as a white women's movement, born out of the same women that made Joanna and Bobbie: rich Caucasian women who had nothing to do to fill their days. Minority women of colour were often in the poor classes of society and were preoccupied with racial rather than gender discrimination, and thus their issues were never really addressed by proponents of the ERA. They were Joanna and Bobbie's maids, cleaning up after them and caring for their children, while Joanna and Bobbie were off demanding equal protection, as is still largely true today. When I watched the Stepford Wives (1975), I was profoundly touched by its message -- depressingly, the women of the 1970's don't look or act all that different from today's women.
Why then would we need a remake? Admittedly, I did not watch the original Stepford Wives until I saw a trailer for the 2004 revival; in fact, I hadn't even heard of it until then. It seems that 30 odd years is enough time for even such a revolutionary film to pass out of popular recollection, especially among the MTV generation who, like myself, can't remember a thing past those old school Transformers cartoons we used to watch. Like the push to Americanize good Asian horror filmes, Hollywood seems to feel that the MTV generation won't watch a film if the quality is of a certain kind of gritty, or if they can't recognize at least one of the stars in the movie.
From the beginning, The Stepford Wives (2004) was doomed, particularly with rumours of dissension among the cast and the high-profile quitting of John and Joan Cusack midway through production, who were slated to play Joanna Eberhard's (Nicole Kidman) husband, Walter Kresby, and her friend in Stepford, Bobbie Markowitz, respectively. Instead, Walter was played by Matthew Broderick who, by sheer aesthetics alone, was a poor match for Nicole Kidman. She is showing her age at 36, and Broderick at 43, looks about 28. Their onscreen match not only lacked chemistry but seemed eerily pedophilic, and his physical youthfulness only accentuated her increasing years. A far cry from the Walter of the 1975 film, Broderick played his role (as he plays all roles) with a schoolboy impishness, that made him seem more like a deer in the headlights than the conniving, political men of the original.
In one of the many attempts to modernize and diversify the film, Bette Midler's character had an -itz tacked on to the end of her name, and was turned into a Jewish Stepford wife. Midler, while her usual funny sarcastic self, played the same character she has played throughout the past two decades -- the slightly overweight, frumpy, embittered Jewish mom, a veritable reincarnation of her role in the First Wives Club. Part of Midler's Stepfordization was to (apparently) drop her Jewishness and become platinum blonde, which was, at least in part, a return to the 'real' meaning of Stepford wives. (As an aside, Oz spends a significant amount of time on a scene in which Joanna attends the women's book club making fun of Midler's Jewishness in a sea of WASP-yness; so much so that it leaves social commentary and a cheap laugh behind, and borders on offensiveness). However, for the most part, director Frank Oz (possibly best known as the voice of Yoda in the Star Wars prequels, though he also directed In 'n Out, which was actually good and, y'know, funny) seemed to be looking to turn the term 'Stepford' into a generic word for 'anti-feminist', ignoring all the racial, and indeed gender, connotations behind its original implications. For example, while it is an interesting exercise, the feminist commentary is lost when Oz attempts to introduce the 'gay Stepford partner' who, originally an effeminate, 'flaming' architect, is turned into ... a gay republican.
Nicole Kidman herself seems out of place in this film, and if she has acting talent, she didn't waste a drop of it here. She waltzes her way through the scenes on name recognition alone, barely eking out any fear or suspense when Joanna begins to suspect that all is not as it seems in Stepford. Whether a poor choice by the screenplay writer or the director, or poor acting on Kidman's part, Joanna spends most of her time trying to emulate the Stepford women, hoping that she can transform herself from the 'career bitch' she was in Manhattan to a well-adjusted suburbanite housewife. Her eventual actual transformation into a Stepford wife is so poorly done that there's little difference (other than the platinum blonde hair) in behaviour between the real Joanna and the Stepford Joanna. Meanwhile, if one were to start to believe that anything can be made better with a dash of Christopher Walken, those illusions were shattered in this film. Though there was nothing wrong, per se, with Walken in this role as Mike Wellington, the leader of the Stepford Men's association, he seems about as bored in this film as Midler is; he did more acting in the Fatboy Slim music video in which all he was asked to do was dance.
Perhaps the person who I most questioned their sanity when they signed on to this film, however, was Glenn Close. I have a fair amount of respect for Close, and I have to wonder what she was thinking when she decided to play Claire Wellington. The role itself was quite fun, and for the most part, she was a welcome bit of comic relief, but perhaps she had spilled coffee on the last twenty or so pages of the script she was sent? The ending that screenwriter Paul Ruddnick (In 'n Out) crazy glued to the film in order to 'twist the twist ending' was campy, cheesy, inane, incoherent, and thoroughly horrible, ultimately cheapening the whole point of 'Stepfordization' and the motivation behind the men who created such a place. While the idea that it is women who prefer subjugation who doom feminism is still intact, Ruddnick turns a dark satire into a comedic happy ending which seems thoroughly out of place and insignificant. A film about the perils of unequal treatment cannot end with the bad guys getting their just desserts -- it diminishes the relevance and social commentary of the message and relegates the entire story to fairy tale status.
Technically, the film is full of holes, and not just the kind that one would only see if searching with a fine-toothed comb. Initially, we are lead to believe that the Stepford wives in the 2004 remake, like their predecessors, are robots and, as we see in the trailer, Joanna is eventually confronted with an android counterpart. And yet, two thirds of the way through the movie, Oz backtracks and decides that the women really have become Stepfordized through implantation of chips in their brains. Yet, scenes of Stepford women doing things only robots could do are still left in the movie. Furthermore, while In 'n Out was a witty and comical look at the process of coming out, the script for the Stepford Wives (2004) was about as flat as a Stepford personality. Dialogue is unconvincing, the comedy is of a slapstick nature and rather banal, motivations are unclear, and all the secondary characters (particularly the Stepford men) seem to have been shorthanded in the script as "men: <insert line>" resulting in an aggravating (and thoroughly unrealistic) tendancy for the men to speak in unison or to act as clamouring yes-men to Mike Wellington's lead.
Unlike in the Stepford Wives (1975) film, in which the concept of replacing all the women with robots is not revealed until the very end, creating a wonderful twist ending, Oz doesn't even try to conceal the fact that robots populate Stepford. If he were planning on resurrecting the film, he had to deal with the fact that the cat was let out of the proverbial bag, and yet rather than either attempt to truly cater to a modern audience that had, most likely, never seen the original, and stick with this ending, he set the film up as if the audience would already know about Stepfordization. It was even, irritatingly enough, in the trailer -- thoroughly ruining the exciting allure of the 1975 original. In fact, Oz carefully and surgically excised any social commentary that could've been found in the 1975 film, leaving nothing but a fast spreading mess on one and a half hours of wasted film.
When I try to think back at what, if anything, was good about the Stepford Wives (2004), I come up short. (I can say that I liked the opening credits, which featured footage of 1950's women and model kitchens of futuristic houses, marvelling over kitchen appliances.) I can only argue that, if there was a positive aspect to the movie, it would be that I hope the publicity from the 2004 remake will encourage everyone to go back and see the 1975 original, a truly outstanding piece of film and commentary.