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Talk about overcompensating. A year after Warner Bros. denied rumors that it would no longer produce films about femmes, the studio releases this Y chromosome-less, for-us-by-us remake — inherited from shuttered Picturehouse — featuring half of SAG’s female membership. At best, though, the film makes amends backhandedly. About gals with two-timing husbands, The Women centers on material girls who scan Saks like a terminator scans a room for John Connor. In the 1939 original, George Cukor introduced these characters through animal parallels (a doe dissolves into Norma Shearer; a fox into Joan Crawford); Murphy Brown creator Diane English introduces them with shots of their feet. A woman’s not an animal! She’s a pair of shoes! After decades of feminist advances, The Women’s women emerge with only nominal gains in equality or empowerment; lifting Sex and the City’s coarseness and consumerism, though, they have crassness to spare. In the pre-war original, the heroine declares, “My husband and I are equals!” In the 21st-century update, Meg Ryan, in the same role, boasts, “I could suck the nails out of a board!” You go, girl?
Opens September 12
Opens September 12
