June 24, 2005

If you’re like me you knew there was a Bewitched movie, but you didn’t know it used a weird meta premise. It turns out that yes, it’s a fantastical romantic comedy starring Nicole Kidman as a pretty blonde witch trying to live among the normies without cheating too much by using her magic, and Will Ferrell as the non-witch she falls in love with. But they don’t exactly play Samantha and Darren, the characters from the sitcom that ran from 1964 to 1972 but that I did in fact watch sometimes as a kid, on Nick at Nite or something. They play the people starring as Samantha and Darren in a 2005 revival of the show.

So I started the movie thinking that director Nora Ephron (writing with her sister Delia, who also wrote THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS) just thought it would be cute to have Nicole Kidman do that nose-wiggle thing Samantha does when she casts a spell, but pretty soon I was thinking no, they just liked the logo and the theme song, and needed an excuse to keep using them throughout. They’re also able to show a bunch of clips from the original show, show a gift basket full of its merchandise, animate the expressions on an officially licensed Samantha Barbie doll, and remake the animated credit sequence with Will Ferrell’s likeness.

He plays Jack Wyatt, flailing movie star slumming by doing this remake, but he loves the show and his instinct is to do a good job until his douchebag agent Ritchie (Jason Schwartzman, SLACKERS) prods him into asshole/diva demands including that they hire an unknown as Samantha (so as not to overshadow him). He sees Isabel Bigelow (Kidman, BATMAN FOREVER) wiggling her nose in a bookstore, gets her to audition and since she actually is a witch trying to start a normal non-witch life and innocently answers his questions about it she seems to be great at improv.

It’s funny that there was an era when there were these sitcoms based around a fantastical premise – I Dream of Jeannie of course, My Favorite Martian, The Munsters, The Addams Family, maybe you could count Mr. Ed and My Mother the Car. In my day we had The Charmings and ALF, I guess those are related. Small Wonder. Anyway, the mismatched couple where one is a witch was a cute sitcom idea and not bad for a cute rom-com idea (though I think the show-within-a-movie gimmick overcomplicates things). Isabel’s naivete and the magical jokes and gimmicks related to the witch world are the most successful parts of the movie. Until recently she’s never done simple tasks without magic, so sitting down and opening a whole bunch of soda cans seems like the greatest thing she’s ever experienced. When her lothario father Nigel (Michael Caine, BATMAN BEGINS) shows up on the studio lot he steps out of a columned corridor that turns out to be a two-dimensional backdrop, and no one notices. He also talks to her while she’s at the grocery store not by calling her but by appearing on packages as Paul Newman, the Jolly Green Giant, etc.

Ferrell gets some laughs in his usual way, which makes it a bit of a strange fit for a rom-com. He has to go through the standard character arc where he’s blowing it and then realizes he’s wrong and wins her back, but how broad he’s playing it makes it hard to buy that this guy is still a sweetheart. He throws a fit about his character testing poorly while hers goes through the roof even though they intentionally gave her almost no lines. How they could possibly do a remake of Bewitched where Samantha has nothing to do is left up to the imagination – the scenes we see them taping are just jokes from the real show, I think, not even modernized.

When she reveals her truth to him there are some decent jokes about him not believing her no matter how much magic she does, and then some about him ranting about her being a real witch and everyone assuming he’s lost it. (Come to think of it we just saw this same basic idea with Matt Dillon at the end of HERBIE: FULLY LOADED.)

Shirley MacLaine (TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA) plays famous actress Iris Smythson, who is playing Endora on the show, but also basically is the Endora character of the movie. Hard to explain. There are little witch references just in the casting – Kristin Chenoweth (playing neighbor/best friend Maria) and Carole Shelley (Aunt Clara – original show character but also Isabel’s real aunt) were both in the original Broadway cast of Wicked, and of course Caine’s inclusion is a pre-emptive nod to the fact that in ten years he’ll be in THE LAST WITCH HUNTER.

Nothing here strikes me as an accurate depiction or satire of circa 2005 Hollywood, but maybe that wasn’t a concern for Ephron. The 2005 media landscape is represented by Conan O’Brien, James Lipton and Ed McMahon appearing on TV as themselves, and by three Daily Show correspondents being in the cast: Stephen Colbert as a Bewitched writer, Steve Carell as original show character Uncle Arthur (imaginary but also real?), and Mo Rocca seen on TV.

One odd time capsule aspect is a scene where Isabel and Nigel shop at Bed Bath and Beyond. The chain still exists, but the downtown Seattle one I used to shop at has been gone for years, so this took me back. Man, that’s alot of bath towels to choose from.

Oh, another product placement is a modern VW Beetle, yellow. Just like Herbie’s girlfriend.

I was surprised to read that the budget for BEWITCHED was $85 million, but I guess it’s a pricey cast and a bit more CG than was cheap at the time. It made its budget back, but only including international, and maybe not including marketing. It got mostly bad reviews and won “Worst Screen Couple” from those assholes that do The Razzies. Most of that is fair, but I don’t agree with Brooke Burns in the New York Times that it’s “an unmitigated disaster.” There is mitigation. It’s a misfire, but not an accidental shooting.

The initial assumption that Kidman would be good at playing this type of character was correct, so that makes it watchable. But maybe it’s too obvious, too easy for her. I’m more of a DESTROYER guy. Or a the queen in THE NORTHMAN guy. That’s why I kinda like the casting of Ferrell – it’s much more unexpected. You just know he never thought he’d be in a movie where he and Nicole Kidman fell in love, and neither did we. Many people will never even find out.