Tired and Twice Told
High Concept Remakes of ‘The Women’ and ‘Django’ Hit New Lows
By Andy Klein
For every good motion picture remake out there, there are 10 bad ones; for every justifiable remake, a hundred that are ill conceived. This week’s duo – The Women and Sukiyaki Western Django – does nothing to improve the ratio.
The Women is, of course, based on the famous 1936 play by the very clever Clare Boothe Luce and the beloved 1939 MGM screen adaptation (co-written, in a weird homophonic coincidence, by the even cleverer Anita Loos). The original starred Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Mary Boland, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, and Marjorie Main, a pretty intimidating gang; but the new version has Meg Ryan, Eva Mendes, Annette Bening, and Bette Midler in place of the first four of these – which is not so shabby either. (I haven’t seen the 1956 version, in which June Allyson, Joan Collins, Delores Gray, and Agnes Moorhead stepped into these roles; but the very fact that it introduced male performers – most prominently Leslie Nielsen! – into the previously all-female cast sounds like a deal breaker.)
Luce’s play was particularly tied to its times, filled with what the author may well have considered eternal verities about romance, sex, marriage, and women’s roles in society. It’s impossible to deny that vast – if still incomplete – advancements have been made in the last seven decades.
Thanks to these wholesale changes in the culture, The Women is either ripe for remaking ... or utterly impossible to reconcile with contemporary life; the idea is either inspired or doomed. Writer/director Diane English – best known for creating Murphy Brown – has made sweeping changes to the characters, while preserving the major basic plot elements.
As in the original, naive, upper-class Mary Haines (Ryan) thinks her marriage to businessman Stephen is as perfect as the rest of her life ... until she discovers that hubby has been stepping out with trashy golddigger Crystal Allen (Mendes). She’s shattered, but her mother (Bergen) counsels patience, much to the shock of Mary’s friends – Edie (Debra Messing), Alex (Jada Pinkett Smith), and magazine editor Sylvie (Bening). (Just for trivia’s sake, let’s note that Ryan has played Bergen’s daughter before, in her screen debut, the 1981 Rich and Famous – the last film made by George Cukor, who also directed ... the original version of The Women!)
Luce’s plot was basically a serviceable edifice on which to hang a series of witticisms, and English hasn’t added much in the way of rigorous structure. Aside from the updating, her main change has been to shift focus toward Mary’s friendship with Sylvie, who betrays her. It’s pretty clear by the end that English considers sisterhood to be a more important theme than marriage.
If this had been released two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been as distracted trying to force it into a political allegory. The moment I saw Mendes, I thought, “Sarah Palin!” ... influencing Stephen (the electorate?) against his best interests (Mary, the Democratic Party), who must reconcile with Sylvie (Hillary Clinton) after a betrayal. Or something.
There’s probably nowhere to go with that.
English’s attempts to fit The Women into a modern setting are intelligent, but that, unfortunately, does not suffice, because the film is so limp in so many other ways. It fails not so much in concept as in execution. While roughly 20 minutes shorter than Cukor’s take, it suffers from logy pacing, both in the overall forward movement and in the timing within scenes. English’s dialogue simply isn’t as clever; the first of my handful of chortles wasn’t provoked until nearly a half hour in. Some lines are arch – “What do you think this is,” Ryan asks Bergen, “some kind of ’30s movie?” Others simply don’t sound like human speech – Bening is forced to mouth the awkward “You’ve not been there?” where an actual person would have said, “You haven’t been there?”
Bits from the earlier versions occasionally pop up, but none too effectively. Viewers with an attachment to Cukor’s film will be disappointed by the disappearance of the long sequence at the Reno divorce ranch. Here it’s shortened to a five-minute segment at some sort of New Age retreat, with Mary Boland’s Countess (“Oh, l’amour, l’amour!”) well reincarnated in Bette Midler as a Sue Mengers-like Hollywood agent. Midler is perfect, but blink and you might miss her.
Technically ... well, the whole thing looks flat (at best) and sometimes downright ugly. And the usually reliable Mark Isham provides a bland score that would be right at home in a James L. Brooks film, and, boy, do I not mean that in a good way.
Technically, Sukiyaki Western Django is the exact opposite. It looks gorgeous, and it sounds pretty good too. But.
Takashi Miike – the turn-of-the-millennium enfant terrible of Japanese cinema – must be feeling his age. He only makes three or four films a year now, as opposed to the five or six a year he seemed to churn out during the ’90s.
Miike is prodigiously talented, but, perhaps because of his prolificacy, his output is hugely variable. He seems to consider every throwaway idea to be worthy of a feature – which would explain Sukiyaki Western Django.
It may not seem very radical to produce a Japanese remake of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 spaghetti western Django. In general, there’s a long tradition of Westerns and samurai films influencing each other. (“Play it again, Samurai!”) More specifically, Corbucci’s film owed a lot to Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, which was itself a scene-for-scene retread of Akira Kurosawa’s seminal Yojimbo. Kurosawa, in turn, took the basic plot concept from Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest. (I’ve never been able to figure out whether Red Harvest was the first in this lineage or Hammett lifted the idea from some earlier source.)
But only Miike would have decided to reset Django in a confused Japanese/cowboy milieu and to direct the cast to speak all their dialogue in “Ingrish” – that is, English as read phonetically with a heavy accent by actors who don’t know English. (Actually, director Piotr Uklanski had his Polish cast do something similar in his Western Summer Love, released here seven months ago.)
Like so many Miike projects, the sheer outrageousness is almost enough to finesse the audience past the confused plot and the sometimes incomprehensible dialogue. Many sequences are shot with wonderfully garish artificial backdrops; and the action is often staged with Hong Kong-style panache. But, for all its virtues, Sukiyaki Western Django is a one-gimmick film that eventually wears out its welcome.
The Women. Written for the screen and directed by Diane English; based on the play by Clare Boothe Luce and the 1939 screenplay by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin. With Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Debra Messing, Candice Bergen, Cloris Leachman, Jada Pinkett Smith, India Ennenga, Debi Mazar, and Bette Midler. Opens Friday citywide.
Sukiyaki Western Django. Directed by Takashi Miike. Screenplay by Masaru Nakamura and Takashi Miike. With Hideaki Ito, Koichi Sato, Yusuke Iseya, Masanobu Ando, Takaaki Ishibashi, Yoshino Kimura, Teruyuki Kagawa, and Quentin Tarantino. Opens Friday at the Nuart.
Published: 09/10/2008
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