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Bewitched June 19, 2005 |
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Here’s a high concept concept that doesn’t quite work: a feature film remake of a TV series revolving around the remake of the same TV series, with the cast serving as both the remaker’s, for fiction, and the surrogate classic characters, for fiction and reality. What, you say. I know; the film is “Bewitched”, but let’s take a hypothetical made up scenario of the same concept to see if we can’t understand it a little better. Our subject for the experiment is Tony Danza, he’s playing a character who is a director named Tony Stanza, in charge of casting a TV remake of “Who’s the Boss”, but during the process he himself, Tony Stanza, has to move in with the single mother actress playing the single mother lawyer on the remake, in a bizarre case of life imitating art, simply because directing lame TV remakes doesn’t net top dollar apartments anymore. They fall in love on the show, and in real life, Tony Stanza is a name in the TV world again, and all is happy in Remakeville. Actually, that isn’t half bad, somebody get me Danza, I’ve got a pitch for him. Now, in “Bewitched”, replace Danza with Will Ferrell as a washed up actor remaking Darrin, and replace the single mother with Nicole Kidman as a real life witch cast as Samantha, and you’ve got yourself the makings of summer fluff- not too harmful, not too wretched, but alas, not too good, and certainly not too intelligent. I never thought I’d say this, but I’d rather have Danza. Kidman, possibly working too much since winning an Oscar in ’02, plays Isabel Bigelow, a modern day witch who is tired of having everything fall her way with the twitch of an ear or the flick of a finger. “I want to have days when my hair is affected by the weather,” she tells her doubting father, played by a slumming Michael Caine, as all the women in the audience having bad hair days slightly chuckle with hate. Her ideal scenario of normalcy is to drop the magic act, find a scruffy schmo to love, and live like every other mortal on Main St. USA. Along comes Jack Wyatt (Ferrell, taking over for a too busy Jim Carrey), a fading, scruffy schmo (Bingo!) of an actor who has just been cast as Darrin in a new “Bewitched” remake, and being the pompous jerk he is, he demands a nobody be cast as Samantha, as long as she looks good, and can wiggle her nose. That is Isabel to a tee; she looks adorable, naturally, and can wiggle her nose like the best of them (that little twinkle-twinkle-twinkle sound gets annoying real fast), so she is hired, leading to a series of romantic comedic setups that has all the charm and sophistication of a late night zombie flick, if only late night zombie flicks starred Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, and a script that doesn’t know the meaning of the terms “too cute” and “go away”. “Acting is better than normal,” Ferrell says to Kidman, trying to persuade her to take the part on the show, “you get to pretend to be normal.” That’s a decent enough line, but it’s too bad nobody in the film took the suggestion, because as it is, these people are only as normal as their slightly satirical Hollywood gloss and banter will take them, and that’s not very far. “Bewitched” was directed and co-written by Nora Ephron, a successful director who found fame and box office with “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail”, another remake. Those two films followed a strict romantic comedy formula, revolving around upper middle class white people and the way they fall in and out of love. The most ethnic thing about ‘Mail’ was Dave Chappelle as Tom Hanks’ buddy, and “Bewitched”, with its blindingly ivory cast (David Alan Grier has a very small role as a director), is even worse in a cute Hollywood other-world, where witches can rewind time as they please, and Will Ferrell can score a cheap laugh out of elongating the word ‘Hummus’ to proper effect. What those previous two films have in common with “Bewitched” is a basic formula that reads like the discarded ‘50’s handbook on adult courtship, where girl forgives boy his rudeness, and boy changes personality because of girl, with much wackiness, a familiar soundtrack of pop ballads, and a keen sense of nostalgia for an old TV classic, thrown in for good measure. The formula is tried and true, but the concept was DOA from the get-go, something the strongest witch’s brew couldn’t possibly fix. “Bewitched” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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