Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildering Case File #196 Bewitched (2005)
This marks the fifth and final entry in Nora Ephron month here at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. When YOU, the Happy Place reader/patron chose Nora Ephron for one of 12 theme months in the epic boondoggle that is 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin I was not overjoyed because I was not an Ephron fan.
Two years and one theme month later I am pleased to report that that is not the case anymore. I’ve gone from being a hater to a lover, from “not a fan” to an out and out Ephron Stan. Oh sure, I’m still not terribly impressed by her romantic comedies but I have come to appreciate even Ephron’s most maligned motion pictures.
I dug Lucky Numbers and Mixed Nuts, was amused by Cookie and utterly charmed by This is My Life and the Julia Child half of Julie & Julia.
I was dreading the mind-numbingly meta 2005 adaptation of Bewitched because I fuzzily remember flat out hating it the first time around.
I must be getting soft in my old age because now I have a hard time imagining anyone legitimately hating this silly little movie with a white-hot burning passion. Does Bewitched work? Not particularly! Is it a great or even good movie? Not really! Yet Bewitched is such a silly, slight, affable motion picture that it seems utterly undeserving of vitriolic contempt.
There are many things wrong with Bewitched. For starters, it is roughly five thousand times more convoluted than it needs to be.
Instead of a faithful adaptation of the beloved 1960s sitcom about a sexy, smart witch and her boob of a husband Ephron instead created a post-modern meditation on the show that revolves around Isabel Bigelow (Nicole Kidman), a genuine witch who wants to leave witchcraft behind and live a normal life.
She picks the worst possible place to attempt normality in Los Angeles. In the City of Angels she’s discovered by Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell), a narcissistic man-child of a movie star reduced to starring in a television remake of Bewitched.
The painfully insecure superstar is worried about being upstaged in a project he already thinks is beneath him so he insists on being paired with a complete unknown.
The show unknowingly ends up hiring a genuine witch for the role in Isabel, who is not an actress, or even a human being, and seems to have only a vague sense of what acting and being human even entail.
Yet Isabel agrees to do the show all the same because she’s looking for a shambling, helpless train wreck of a man to save with her kindness and unconditional devotion and Jack fits that description.
The path of true love winds through a predictable gauntlet of sitcom complications and contrivances, however. Isabel overhears part of a conversation between Jack and his asshole agent Ritchie (Jason Schwartzman) about the cynical, opportunistic reasons for her casting and makes wrong assumptions based on that misunderstanding.
Then an older witch casts a spell on the cocky actor that causes him to fall madly in love with Isabel and the rest of the world simultaneously. This frustrates the fresh-faced practitioner of black magic because she wants the dolt to fall in love with for the right reasons, because she’s the most beautiful, radiant creature in existence and adores him for some reason, and not due to witchcraft.
The Ephrons write themselves into such a corner here that the third act contains both an only semi-ironic montage sequence set to R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts” AND a Deus ex machina in the form of Steve Carrell doing a mostly passable Paul Lynde impression as Uncle Arthur, the wisecracking wisenheimer Lynde played on the original show.
In this world Bewitched is a television show about people who do not exist. Accordingly, Uncle Arthur is a figure of fantasy several times removed from reality but also the catalyst who makes Jack realize how much he loves and needs Isabel. If that sounds absurdly, unnecessarily complicated, that’s because it is but it also reflects the weirdly bifurcated nature of a movie that’s at once bizarrely reverent towards its inspiration and wholly unfaithful at the same time.
Bewitched is very much a product of its time. When the movie was released to scathing reviews and underwhelming box-office in 2005 its star was probably the hottest cinematic funnyman in the world thanks to Old School, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Elf.
Everybody wanted Ferrell and his manic, improvisational magic so when he agreed to appear in Bewitched it became a Will Ferrell movie by default. Ephron clearly encouraged Ferrell to make the role and the movie his own, to toss aside the script she co-wrote with sister Delia and improvise to his heart’s content.
Ferrell has his moments here, like an extended riff where his crazed egotist demands three trailers, a make-up team in matching jumpsuits, a leopard with a diamond-studded collar and a two-story cake delivered to the set every Wednesday to commemorate it being Cake Day as conditions for doing Bewitched.
It’s an amusing bit, bordering on funny but it does not belong in a glossy romantic comedy about a beautiful witch who wants more than anything to be unremarkable.
Bewitched suffers from an identity crisis. It’s divided against itself in unmistakably gendered ways. Bewitched doesn’t work as a slick romantic comedy about a preternaturally beautiful witch finding love in the unlikeliest of places because it’s at least partially a bro comedy about a towering, self-absorbed jackass who couldn’t be further from a conventional romantic leading man.
Bewitched similarly does not succeed as a post-Anchorman, Judd Apatow/Adam McKay-style bro comedy because it’s also a slick romantic comedy about a preternaturally beautiful witch finding love in the unlikeliest of places.
The film’s two moods—boyish, broad and wacky when it comes to Jack and his personal and professional travails and swooning, romantic and daffy when dealing with Isabel’s exploration of what it means to be human—do not mesh at all.
Ferrell and Kidman don’t have particularly strong chemistry and Ferrell is too monomaniacally focussed on getting laughs to make for a good romantic leading man. Yet I nevertheless found plenty to like about Bewitched this time around.
Some of the inside baseball show-business satire is inspired, like an animated opening for the new Bewitched that reflects its new focus all too clearly by highlighting Jack almost exclusively or Jack’s agent observing that his last movie was such a disaster that it’s the first movie in history to sell zero DVDs.
I similarly found myself digging Kidman’s performance. She’s sweet and dreamy and appropriately ethereal, an out of this world beauty with poignantly banal desires to be just like everyone else.
I wouldn’t exactly say I liked Bewitched but I didn’t dislike it either. I fear that I am becoming a non-ironic version of Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s On Cinema, where a big part of the meta joke is that they like every movie and bring to the world of movie reviewing a normie’s uncritical, unconditional love of Hollywood product rather than a critic’s cold analytic eye.
I’m a film writer but I’m not a film critic anymore. It’s been a good four years since anyone paid me to review a new movie. I’m less critical now that I’m not a critic anymore. I’m much more open to the fluffy, silly pleasures of movies like Bewitched, which may aggressively not work on a fundamental level but is painless, pretty and often amusing all the same. There’s something to be said for movies like that even if they aren’t fine art or even solid entertainment.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Fiascolure
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