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The Women

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Cert: 12A

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Dir: Diane English. Cast: Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Debra Messing, Jada Pinkett Smith, Eva Mendes, Carrie Fisher, Bette Midler, Debi Mazar

 

Description: Mary Haines is a successful, part-time fashion designer with a handsome Wall Street husband Stephen, a 12-year-old daughter Molly and a picture postcard home in Connecticut, plus a coterie of loyal friends at the heart of New York City life. This inner circle includes women's magazine editor Sylvie Fowler, clucky mother hen Edie Cohen and sassy writer Alex Fisher, who believes in always dealing the truth. When the pals learn from manicurist Tanya that Stephen is having an affair with gold-digger Crystal Allen, they offer Mary all the support they can.

Country: US. 2008. 114mins

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Only one sex in the city for The Women

 

Nail file: Mary (Meg Ryan) listens agog to the latest nail-bar gossip, not yet suspecting that the unfaithful swine they are talking about is her husband

Call me: Eva Mendez stars in the film

Sisters doing it for themselves: women dominate the film

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• The Duchess review

It is difficult to determine whether this adaptation of the old Clare Boothe Luce play, and the 1939 George Cukor film version of it, is a calculated insult to all women or just a poorly directed effort to understand the fair sex. At any rate, it is mighty irritating to sit through it as a mere man.

Written for the screen and directed by Diane English, it has Meg Ryan — with first a long, curly hair-do and then an even longer, straight one — as Mary, who has a successful Wall Street husband, a beautiful home in Connecticut and a part-time career as a designer to prevent her getting bored. She also has a 12-year-old daughter who smokes to prevent herself from eating and getting fat.

Alas, everything comes crumbling down when Mary learns that hubby is having an affair with a perfume spritzer girl (Eva Mendes) from Saks. Mary discovers this when her best friend, Sylvie (Annette Bening), the newly installed editor of a floundering women’s magazine called Cachet, is told the gossip by the manicurist at the Fifth Avenue store.

Mary’s female friends, who include Debra Messing and Jada Pinkett Smith, close ranks around her, hoping that she will have it out with her husband and stay in the marriage. But she doesn’t, and divorce seems to be on the cards.

Ultimately, though, she heeds the advice of her mother (Candice Bergen) and goes for an all-girl break in Maine to consider her position. Of course, she really wants to stay married, like all good women, and true.

Shortly afterwards, Sylvie does the dirty on her and gives the story to a journalist (Carrie Fisher) in order to keep news of her own possible sacking at the magazine. This infuriates Mary and the two part, seemingly for good.

At this point I should mention that there is only one male in the entire movie, and he’s a baby born in the penultimate scene to one of her friends who keeps getting pregnant and seems to like the idea until her waters break. The absence of the male sex, in this context, leaves a gaping hole in the film since the women, when not talking about clothes and shopping, talk about them most of the time.

We would like to see a few examples, if only to find out whether they are as tiresome as Pinkett Smith’s lesbian, tactfully described as a “ladies lady”, stridently thinks.

In the end, you may be glad to hear, everything comes right for Mary and her well-dressed and lacquered friends who, if asked how the other half lived, would scarcely know how to answer.

They seem to exist in a make-believe world that could only be super middle-class America and would probably scorn Sarah Palin as irredeemably vulgar, despite her fashionable glasses. They seem liberal and reactionary at the same time.

Diane English is more successful with her screenplay than with her direction which, though just competent, meanders on until one is almost overtaken by sleep. And there are, it is true, some nice lines and scenes.

These usually involve three minor cogs in the drama. Among them is Mary’s mother, who insists on having a painful face-job, saying to her daughter: “Have you looked around lately? There are no 60-year-old women.” Not in her set, perhaps, but then, swishing about in their 4x4s and Lexuses, this lot wouldn’t even notice the general public. “Don’t be bitter, Mary,” she says on another occasion, “it only leads to Botox.”

It’s a distinctive cameo from Bergen, as is Cloris Leachman’s as Mary’s seen-it-all veteran housekeeper. In another small role, Bette Midler, who suddenly arrives on the scene as another of Mary’s old friends — four times married and now in love with someone else — is just as good. She suggests that the best way of working things out is “not to give a shit about anyone”.

When you can see her face for her hair, Ryan gives a lively performance and complains that, though sex with the same man for 13 years can get a bit samey, she could “suck the nails out of a board, and that’s a fact”.

There’s not much mincing of words in this film but the best lines probably go to Bening who, when told that it might be a good idea to publish an article about the 45-minute orgasm, complains: “Who has the time?”

Two other notable lines are given to this tetchy magazine editor. “There’s a fine line between an outfit and a get-up,” and “What are the two most feared words in the English language? Pool party.”

Unfortunately, much of the film is not so notable. The trouble with The Women is that it skates permanently over the surface of things, which is OK if the direction has the style of George Cukor but not if it’s mediocre in the extreme. This makes Sex and the City look like a masterpiece — and that’s saying something

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