Luce's play was dipped in acid, and the film George Cukor made of it in 1939 was a barbed fashion show -cattiness and glamour. Neither one is the riot it must have been all those years ago, but you could see the mockery both wanted to make of rich ladies with too much time on their hands. English has spent years trying to get her remake off the ground. For any number of reasons (many to do with casting), it kept not happening. Now that it's here you have to wonder why she ever fought so hard to see it through.
For one thing, the movie is a work of ambivalence. Is English making fun of these women? Or is she making a pilot for Lifetime? It's hard to tell. Bening's character, the endangered editor of a stagnating women's magazine, is the most sensible of everybody and exhibits what wit the movie has. But within minutes of our meeting her, she enters a Saks Fifth Avenue, and as she eyes the merchandise the screen goes green with a military readout that may as well be from "Predator." We have a bionic shopper on our hands.
Ryan, meanwhile, is all her usual pouts, quirks, whines, and crinkled faces. She's now like a Meg Ryan impersonator. English has given the impersonation all the trimmings, too - galoshes, sundresses, endless golden hair to toss out of her face, a garden to tend while talking on her cellphone, an SUV to climb out of, a giant dog to go bounding around her Connecticut house. Eventually, Mary finds the only trimming that matters: self-empowerment. After the humiliation of a messy public divorce, she straightens her hair (I'd call the new cut Chewbacca Barbie, but you decide) and attempts to make her fashion dreams come true with what can only be described as designer nursewear.
