Film Reviews

The Women

• Rating:
• Director: Diane English
• Starring: Debra Messing
• Details: USA / (15A)

Following fast on the designer heels of Sex and the City is this remake of the 1930s frolic-ridden comedy. A bunch of well-to-do middle-aged women rally around their mate Mary (Meg Ryan, looking like she got her face caught in a particularly powerful hoover), when her husband has an affair with Eva Mendes's perfume counter temptress. This leaves Mary with quite the predicament; does she listen to her mother (Candice Bergin, obviously thinking about her mortgage payments) and say nothing to her husband for the sake of her daughter, or does she remove his nuts using adrenaline-filled rage? The answer is pretty much neither, as the noteworthy cast spend the entire film standing around and talking about staggeringly superficial things - oh, and shopping. It's not funny, the performances are mostly awkward, and the direction is utterly pedestrian at best. Instead of dealing with the issues that real middle-aged women face today, we get rich people with nannies, shiny sports cars and dogs in designer bags. All of that is vexing enough when it's talentless, inexplicably famous socialites like Paris Hilton: but how is it relevant to these "career women"? Just to "modernise" things, we also get a black lesbian friend (Pinkett-Smith), who is naturally the moody, abrasive one. It's bordering on offensive at points - especially when Pinkett-Smith's lipstick lesbian explains to Debra Messing's baby factory that she went to the other side "because [they] both like to have sex with the lights off". If you're a die-hard fan of chick flicks, then you may find something to pass the time until the SatC folk churn out another celluloid-based outing, but there really is precious little here to recommend. I tell ya one thing, though: men are bastards.

Review by Mike Sheridan