Rhymes with "Witch"

"Bewitched" banks on some voodoo it don't do too well.  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Get to see Will Ferrell relive some SNL shtick.

The Downside: It's a hopeless mess.

    It's amazing- the amount of hype that went into Bewitched, especially considering how little of value actually comes out of it.  But instead of being my old rambling self, how about we take a look at what goes wrong, piece by piece?

    The Concept:  Rather than taking the well-used road of TV adaptation and turning Bewitched into a 90-minute long sit-com, this Nora Ephron update places us in the "real world" (you'll get why I'm using quotations in a second) where Bewitched is nothing more than a campy 60s television show.  The premise here is that washed-up B-movie actor Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell) is looking to get back into the limelight.  To do so, he hijacks a "retooling" of the old television series, determined to make himself the star by casting a talentless unknown in the role of Samantha.  When he runs across Isabel Bigelow (Nicole Kidman), she strikes him as the perfect walk-on mannequin- she's got the nose thing down, but seems to have all the on-screen aggressiveness of cheese spread.

    The catch, of course, is that Isabel is actually a witch and when she learns she's just being used by this Hollywood Squares-wanna be, well, if you think you know what happens next, you're probably right.

    The idea itself seems different and from the outside unusual enough to mine some laughs.  This doesn't happen because Bewitched remains nothing more than a tidily scripted piece of TV-land fluff.  It has plenty of chances to make some wild and risky choices, but director Nora Ephron pretty much leaves these alone.  Take for example, there's a moment in which Jack Wyatt is being interviewed by James Lipton of Inside the Actor's Circle.  Watching this, I couldn't help but think of Will Ferrell's uproarious takes of Lipton as an overpraising  hambone on Saturday Night Live.  I began to think- why was Lipton dragged in to do this?  Why couldn't have Farrell done his send-up, which would have ended up ten times funnier than anything else in the movie?  Come to think of it, that's probably why.

    The Acting:  There's a sad irony to Bewitched.  The plot features Jack Wyatt as a scenery-chewer who tries to upstage his on-screen co-star.  The strange thing is that this is what happens in the movie itself.  Kidman has the look, and last year's underrated howler The Stepford Wives proved she can do slapstick comedy, however as Isabel nothing is expected of her other than to wiggle particular parts of her face on cue and say her lines in an almost embarrassed whisper.  Ferrell, on the other hand, is given the lion's share of full-contact humor.  Take one scene in which Isabel tries to humiliate Jack during a taping by screwing with his line readings.  With a snap of the fingers, Jack's dialogue goes from mush-mouthed to Shakespearean to foppish and it is a sight to see.  The problem is, in the story Isabel is pulling the strings, but it's Ferrell giving the performance.  I'm not saying Kidman's slacking off- I'm saying Bewitched gives her nothing to work with while making Ferrell the clownish stand-out.

    The Writing:  After a certain point, you realize that Bewitched is not going to ascend to a level much higher than a rote comedy.  But even judging it by these standards, it suffers from some very deep problems.  The screenplay by Delia and Nora Ephron burns coherency like propane, having characters like Isabel's next door neighbor (Kristin Chenoweth) wander in and out, at some points seeming to know that Isabel is a witch and at others being completely in the dark.  The third act introduces a character played by The Daily Show's Steve Carell- a character who seems to have no purpose to the story, and one that no one is sure actually exists or not.  It's frustrating when a story can't maintain a toe-hold on a basic degree of logic.

    Bewitched is constructed as a romantic comedy, but it is a repetitive and tiresome one at that.  Everyone who has seen these kinds of movies knows the rollercoaster effect- two people meet, fall in love (usually to a musical montage), suffer some major setback or loss of trust, only to be redeemed in the end.  Bewitched may have been better served if it had stuck to this formula, although no one would have accused it of being original.  Instead, we're treated to no less than three variations of Jack and Isabel falling for each other.  Their romance goes from hot to cold and back again so often and so quickly I'm surprised masses of audience members haven't walked out with pneumonia. 

    There are a lot of ways Bewitched could have gone.  One idea that occurred to me would be going the Charlie Kaufman route and having everyone play themselves ("Nicole Kidman a witch?  That explains her nose in The Hours.").  Just a thought, but it's kind of a sign how banal an experience a movie becomes when all you can do is think about how it could have been done better.  What we have, though, is a film that is disjointed, incoherent, and funny only through the heroic efforts of its cast.  It isn't magic.  It isn't even good trickery.  D+

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