Every witch way
Mark Steyn
Bewitched
PG, selected cinemas
Bewitched The Movie isn’t a remake of Bewitched The Sitcom. It’s a movie about a remake of the sitcom. Who says bigscreen recycling of boomer TV is all out of ideas? But in this picture about making a new updated version of Bewitched, the wrinkle is that the gal they hire to play Samantha the TV witch is herself a real-life witch. So it’s a meta-Bewitched rather than a pseudoBewitched. It’s Kiss Me, Kate to the sitcom’s Taming of the Shrew.
The original Bewitched ran on TV from 1964 to 1972 and starred Elizabeth Montgomery as the twitchy-nosed Samantha Stevens. Like many sitcoms of the golden age, it’s about an unconventional female trying hard to be a conventional wife. Initially, these gals were just kooky redheads like Lucy, but by the time of Bewitched and I Dream Of Jeannie they were actual witches and genies. Naturally, a wife with supernatural powers is a threat to your typical Sixties husband — and Bewitched’s husband was so typical that, as someone says in this film, they switched actors and no one even noticed. Anyway, the basic joke in Bewitched is a witch struggling hard to adapt to domesticity without using her magic. ‘You’re going to have to learn to be a suburban housewife,’ Darrin tells her in the first episode. ‘You’re going to have to cook and clean house... ’ ‘Darling, it sounds wonderful,’ coos Samantha. ‘We’re going to be a normal married couple... ’ Maybe that wouldn’t work so well in 2005. So instead Bewitched The Movie gives us Isabel Bigelow, a young witch who wants to give up her magic and live a normal life not for some man — perish the thought — but because... well, er, just because. That’s only the first example of how the movie gaily tosses the pillars of the TV show overboard without thinking through what it’s going to put in its place. The creators of this flavourless confection are Nora Ephron and her sister Delia. Presumably their first choice for the nosetwitcher was Meg Ryan, the star of Nora’s When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, etc. But these days Meg Ryan’s too busy with nude scenes and collagen implants for any girl-next-door roles, so the Ephrons make do with Nicole Kidman. Still, Miss Kidman gamely does her best Meg Ryan, which is a bit mystifying in a role supposed to evoke Elizabeth Montgomery. Speaking in a baby-doll register, she comes off like a rather bland remake of her homicidal weather girl in To Die For, and a much more conventional sitcom girl than Samantha ever was.
At which point enter Will Ferrell, working very hard at being funny. He’s hot these days. Well, OK, not exactly hot, but he makes a comedy a month, so somebody must like him. And this month his designated comedy is Bewitched. The joke here is that he’s a movie actor whose career has tanked and thus is reduced to taking a sitcom — the remake of Bewitched. Even worse, he’s going to be Darrin. Darrin was played by Dick Sargent and then Dick York, or possibly vice-versa, as if anyone cares. As they say in Wayne’s World: ‘Dick York. Dick Sargent. Sergeant York. Hey, that’s weird.’ But, as the muscle in this new sitcom, Will Ferrell’s character decides the new show’s going to marginalise the Samantha character and play up Darrin.
So we’ve got Hollywood industry jokes and shallowness-of-actors jokes, but we seem to have lost, in every sense, a lot of the magic. In the third episode of the sitcom, one of Darrin’s clients gets fresh with Sam and she turns him into a poodle. Unfortunately, before she can turn him back, he’s whisked off to a poodle parlour and gets shorn and primped. When she restores him to human form, his hair’s been permed and has a ribbon in it and his eyebrows have been ruffled and extravagantly styled. That’s a better visual gag than anything in the movie. The charm of Bewitched was that it was domestic magic — supernatural powers on a human scale. In the first show, Darrin’s ex-girlfriend invites them to dinner and is a total bitch. Samantha causes her dress to collapse and her wig to fly off. The movie goes to the trouble of recreating that episode but without any of the comic brio. Not only doesn’t the film come up with any magic of its own, it can’t even restage the old stuff.
What does that leave? For a film about formulaic sitcoms, it doesn’t disdain formula itself: No sooner has Nicole Kidman moved into her new house than she’s provided with an instant best friend who lives next door: giggly, jiggly Kristin Chenoweth, a funny dame in a part totally unworthy of her. Shirley MacLaine turns up as the witch’s sitcom mom Endora and Michael Caine plays the witch’s real-life dad Nigel, in what seem to be out-takes from his Alfred the butler routine. As always with Nora Ephron, the music has its moments: the lyric to Jack Keller and Howie Greenfield’s marvellous ‘Bewitched’ theme was never heard in the show, but Miss Ephron dusts off the Steve Lawrence hipster vocal (no room for Peggy Lee’s sultry version, alas), and inevitably there’s Sinatra and ‘Witchcraft’. But the Ephron formula feels creakier than any Sixties sitcom these days.
And, with this casting, there’s nothing to hide it. As a California witch, Nicole Kidman’s sweet. And, as a shallow third-rate movie star, Will Ferrell’s very plausible. But the two never connect: there’s no chemistry; they might as well be in separate movies. Miss Kidman will beat a retreat back to semi-arty Oscar bait, but this is supposed to be Ferrell’s turf. Why didn’t the alarm bells ring? Option Bewitched, but cut out all the fun tricks, downgrade the Samantha role and upgrade the likeable stiff of a husband into a domineering narcissist? You can wave your wand as furiously as Nora Ephron but no magic’ll work on that.
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