Stepford Wives

Year: 2004 Rating: PG-13 Overall Evaluation: 4.0 Significance Suppositions Story Style 3.0 / 10 3.0 / 10 4.0 / 10 8.0 / 10 Click HERE for evaluation criteria.

Style

Rated PG-13 for sexual content, thematic material and language. Nothing too bad really, certainly nothing gratuitous (the audio on "the sex scene" is more humorous than erotic).

Story

This is a confused story to be sure (in the spoiler I will explain the confusion over the ending and the Joanne shell scene). Basically the idea is that this troubled couple move to a perfect community called Stepford only to discover that some comically horrible thing is going on with the wives who all seem just TOO perfect. It is poorly told and incoherent in many ways, leading to the confusion that I will now, hopefully, clear up . . .

[SPOILER WARNING!]

The original 1975 film from was a horror movie where we discover (at the end) that the real wives have been killed and replaced by robot wives. This story, however, decides to introduce this at the beginning and make the idea into a comedy. This pretty well ruins the whole plot. Worse, we are given confused messages: the wives act as ATM machines and have remote controls, yet the process by which this takes place is described as nothing more than a body makeover ("they didn't used to look like this!") and a few computer chips implanted in the brain. But THEN when the heroine gets ready to be transformed she is first shown a shell-body of herself. So which is it?
OK here's the deal: the wives ARE robots - they are first killed and their their brains (with the chips implanted) are installed in robot bodies. This is made evident by the sparks that come out of the first malfunction's ears and the speed at which she danced, the breast-enhancement scene, the ATM scene, and the strength they show at the end of the movie when they easily crush their husband's remote controls. So there you go.

Suppositions

There is a lot wrong with this film, but as a comedy most of it can be forgiven. What cannot be forgiven is the caricatured portrayal of men and women and their respective values. More on this below.

Significance

The message of the film is made clear within minutes of the film's opening. Women are shown working in the home in a campy, 1950's Leave-It-To-Beaver kind of way and then this is contrasted with the heroine of the film who is a frigid, driven, man-hating bi*ch (her words). The other "good-guys" of the story are an ex-hippie with an eating disorder who is hooked on Prozac and the ever-popular flamboyant gay guy. These are supposed to represent "real" people as opposed to the robotic wives who keep decent homes and dote on their families. One noticeable problem with this message is that Stepford IS crime free and all the families ARE happy. Oops. Now of course it is not worth a perfect world to have everyone turned into robots, but it goes deeper than this. This film projects the message that it's not worth a perfect world to not have druggies, homosexuals, and unloving wives with emasculated husbands trotting along at their heels (and of course the only "strong" women are those that have such lives). This blatant and pathetic attack on the family and traditional values has to resort to such ridiculous means to achieve its message that it ends up only proving the weakness of its own position.