Bewitched: A Review

BEWITCHED

This review is part of the Summer Under the Stars Blogathon. Today's star is Shirley MacLaine. 

There was a brief time when filmmakers decided to raid old TV Guide issues for their next projects. Writer/director Nora Ephron decided that she was going to take a different tactic with these television-to-film adaptations by going meta. Thus, we got Bewitched, a curious and contradictory effort to simultaneously adapt the television series and be separate from the television series. Unsure of itself, Bewitched tries to be clever but ends up only confused about itself.

Isabel Bigelow (Nicole Kidman) is a literal witch who wants to give up witchcraft and live as a mortal. 

Quick side note: it is unclear if Bigelow is Isabel's actual last name or something she made up on the spot. The film tries to have it both ways.

Isabel's father Nigel (Michael Caine) is appalled at her plans but cannot change her mind. With that, Isabel tries to get off the magic but finds it hard to not use it as she is unfamiliar with life in the mortal world. Into this situation, she stumbles into Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell). Jack is a well-known actor whose latest film, Last Year in Katmandu, flopped big-time. Looking to revive his flailing career, his agent Richie (Jason Schwartzman) gets him to agree to a reboot of the television series Bewitched. To placate Jack's ego, the show will now put his character of Darrin as the focus versus Darrin's wife, Samantha.

Jack thinks that Isabel, who makes clear that she is not an actress, would be perfect as Samantha. Despite never having seen Bewitched (Nigel saying that it degraded their kind), Isabel is cast, along with legendary acting diva Iris Smythson (Shirley MacLaine) as Endora. Isabel, good natured and naive about things, is enraged to find that Jack and Richie are playing her for a sucker. Hell hath no fury like a witch scorned. Isabel is not above using her witch powers to get back at Jack.

Jack for his part is befuddled by things. He grows more befuddled when Isabel's Aunt Clara (Carole Shelley) puts a hex on Jack to make him totally besotted and subservient to Isabel. Fortunately for Isabel, she is able to literally rewind the past to make all this go away. She rewinds and erases the past twice, I should add. Will the rakish Nigel fall for Iris, who is revealed to be a witch herself? Will Jack need the help of Uncle Arthur (Steve Carrell) to sort out his feelings and screen credit for Isabel?

As I thought on Bewitched, I thought that the idea of being meta with the material in and of itself isn't a bad one. One could have some fun with winking a bit at the audience about a woman who is a witch playing a woman who is a witch. The problem is that Bewitched is simply poorly executed. Nora Ephron, writing with her sister Delia, were both trying to be too clever with the material. Instead of being witty and clever, they ended up muddled and confused. From what I saw, Bewitched tried to have it both ways. It wanted to spell out that it was fully aware of the source material (no pun intended). It also wanted to be part of the material.

 

Let's see if I can set the situation for how Bewitched needlessly tied itself into knots. Everyone is aware of the television series Bewitched, along with the series' premise (mortal man marries a witch, hijinks ensue with the wife and her witch family causing chaos unintentional or not). On the show, you have characters like Darrin's mother-in-law Endora, and Samantha's Aunt Clara and Uncle Arthur. So far, so good. 

HOWEVER, Aunt Clara, the Bewitched television character on the reboot that Isabel is in, is also Isabel's actual aunt also named Clara. Isabel's Aunt Clara also happens to have the same accident-prone nature of the television series' Aunt Clara. I don't think that there is any way to make sense out of that. If Bewitched the movie is to be believed, the television Aunt Clara is somehow also Isabel's Aunt Clara. Either that, or there is a wild and irrational coincidence that Isabel happens to have a literal Aunt Clara who is exactly like the character of Aunt Clara on a television show that Isabel was forbidden to watch prior to entering the mortal world.

The Uncle Arthur situation is even more puzzling to irrational to downright nuts. Jack had mentioned earlier that Uncle Arthur was his favorite character on Bewitched, the television show. Near the film's conclusion, Uncle Arthur appears to Darrin in the way Uncle Arthur would appear on Bewitched, the show. This would mean that Jack is seeing a literal figment of his imagination as he should know that Uncle Arthur does not exist.

Yet, somehow, Uncle Arthur appears to be real, fully involved with Isabel's witch world as he says that he knows how that world operates. Carrell here is apparently playing a Paul Lynde impersonator playing Paul Lynde playing Uncle Arthur. I say this because Carrell adopts Paul Lynde's voice and mannerisms as Uncle Arthur. I thought Carrell's Paul Lynde impersonation was wildly exaggerated. Even for someone as camp as Paul Lynde, he was never that over-the-top. 

I figure that Carrell was attempting to play the Uncle Arthur from the television show. However, by the time he pops it, Bewitched is so confused about whether it is trying to be an adaptation of the television show or be a movie about adapting the original show that one simply does not know what to think. "I'm about to be killed by a fictional character," Jack screams out. That, I think sums up what is wrong with Bewitched. I get the desire to not be a straightforward film version of the television series. I can even respect the desire to play with the premise. What fails, what ultimately fails Bewitched is that it never decided which route to take. As such, it wanted to take both routes, which ended up confusing everyone.  

Bewitched puts in elements that never get a solid answer. We learn that Iris is actually a witch. We see her casting spells. Yet, we never know exactly why she is a witch. We do not learn if Nigel actually falls in love with Iris or is himself placed under a love spell. We also pretty much drop them from Bewitched, leaving such questions unanswered.

Perhaps the worst element in Bewitched is in how Isabel erased a long section of the Isabel/Jack relationship by literally rewinding what we had seen and erasing it from ever happening. It is a cheap and lazy way to not deal with the situation that the film had taken our time to present. One wonders why Isabel simply did not do this from the get-go. Worse, she does this rewind again when Jack's ex-wife Sheila (Katie Finneran) appears. At first, Isabel's witchcraft causes a light to fall on her, which would have killed her. Saying to herself that it was probably a bit too much, she just rewinds and has her merely whipped by a wind machine. It was the worst thing that the Ephron sisters could have done to move the plot forward. 

It is unfortunate that Bewitched was such a disaster because I think the actors genuinely tried to make it good. Nicole Kidman was game to play Isabel as this woman who wants a normal life but ends up in the most unnormal world of television. She does well as Isabel and when playing Samantha. Will Ferrell too I think tried to make Jack's egocentrism humorous. If you like Ferrell's manic, madcap manner, you will find Bewitched tolerable. If you don't, you will find Bewitched unbearable. The film has a montage of clips from his past films. I liked the quick glimpses of Sunday's Fool, Atticus Rex, An Onion for Wally and the infamous Last Year in Katmandu (where he plays a Vietnam War soldier from the South, a Roman soldier, a boxer and a Himalayan explorer respectively). I get that Jack is supposed to be an idiot. I don't get how he could plausibly have been a star, even in this world. 

Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine were here for a good paycheck where they could be as over-the-top as their hearts wanted. To be fair, Caine appears to have tried to play the situations straight with a hint of mischief. He has a nice section where he pops up to berate his daughter while she's shopping. I hope he kept the Newman's Own box where we see his face rather than Paul Newman's. MacLaine camped it up to almost unheard-of levels. I guess she figured that she was playing an over-the-top acting diva who just happened to be a witch. As such, she just ran with it and never looked back. 

Bewitched is misguided and misdirected in every sense of the word. They thought that they were being clever with the material. They were actually being incoherent with the material. Bewitched will not put a spell on anyone, except perhaps one to have you fall asleep.

DECISION: D+