This updated version of the Ira Levin novel, first adapted for the movies (drearily) in 1975, is bright and funny for about an hour. A bunch of drippily unattractive and frightened husbands, retreating to the wealthy, bland Connecticut town of Stepford, turn their high-powered wives into perfect slave robots. The script, by Paul Rudnick, and the set design, by Jackson De Govia, transform Levin's thriller material into spoof. The dresses of the robot wives are a riot of patterned gingham, the wives' exercises, as choreographed by Patricia Birch, imitate the gently spinning movements of washing machines, and the sparkling mansions are high-windowed and strewn with flowers. In essence, the movie represents Rudnick's riff on the square world, which he takes to be everywhere outside of New York. The heroines include two yet to be robotized women-Bette Midler, slamming into scenes like a runaway truck, and Nicole Kidman, who has energy and spark. But Matthew Broderick, as her husband, a Caspar Milquetoast with a flap of hair falling over his forehead, never seems to get into the movie at all, and, somewhere in the middle, the rusty gothic-horror mechanics underneath the comedy bring everything to a grinding halt. With Glenn Close and Christopher Walken, giving their all as the smoothly malicious leaders of Stepford. Directed, shakily, by Frank Oz. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker
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