Surely they were wrong though, I thought. This was a movie that had "witches" in the title that starred Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and freaking Cher! John Williams scored it, and it was directed by the master of Mad Max: Fury Road himself, George Miller! What could be terrible about this movie?
Oh god, everything. A lot of talented people seem like they put in a lot of effort to make a terrible, terrible movie. But why is it terrible? It has good actors, was made by talented people... but tone is bizarre and the philosophy of this movie is just all wrong. It just turns my stomach that this movie that COULD have been so feminist and positive allowed pretty much no female power by the movie's end.
But let's start at the beginning: Cher, Michelle, and Susan all play Alex, Sukie, and Jane respectively. They are all single women who live in a small, New England town. Alex is a no-nonsense single mom of a teenager and is an artist (specifically a feminist sculptor), Sukie is a reporter for the local newspaper and is raising five kids on her own after her husband left her (for being too fertile, the movie posits), and Jane is a music teacher at the local high school who just got divorced and has no children. They are all best friends for a variety of reasons, but especially because they all experience sexual harassment from the same man, Walter.
Walter is terrible. Walter flirts with the women in front of his wife, grabs Jane's ass in front of her students, and is just terribly, terribly creepy. The women have a weekly ladies' night to drink cocktails and talk about how terrible Walter is. In the most recent ladies' night, they women talk about how they had all wished for Walter to stop talking at some point that day, and then a terrible rain storm started, drowned him out, and everyone had to rush away. Sukie seems to suspect that the women might have some kind of power...
This is great, I thought. Surely the plot will be the women discovering their powers, and then they'll get revenge on Walter in some way. NOPE. NO. NOT AT ALL WHAT HAPPENS. Instead, Walter never is held accountable for his actions or revenged on in any way. He's just the way that we're supposed to see these women as put-upon and vulnerable. It's awful.
Instead, the women talk about their ideal man: a suave stranger who would appear from out of town to sweep them off their feet. Indeed, the wind picks up, and it seems that the three women have summoned something... but instead of a suave anything, they get Jack Nicholson.
Jack Nicholson's character is horrible. Just awful. I can't even describe how terrible he is. He's like if a fake-male-feminist and an MRA comment board birthed a person.
He presents himself as an independently wealthy man from New York who buys a mysterious mansion on the edge of town, but the viewing audience learns pretty quickly that he is both figuratively and literally a demon who has been summoned by the witches' power. He tries to seduce each of the three women by simultaneously praising women as a "species" and talking about how great women are, while he also negs them and criticizes their ways of carrying themselves, asking questions, or playing the cello.
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| Let me tell you why you're bad at the thing you hang your entire identity on. Good, now sleep with me. |
There is a brief period of time that I thought there was positive commentary in this. He is a literal demon after all. The demons in the amazing show The Good Place also have terrible male qualities and it's a commentary that acting this way is essentially "demonic." And in Witches of Eastwick, Cher's Alex seems to recognize how terrible Nicholson's character is and gives an amazing speech:
I think... no, I am positive... that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. You know, in the short time we've been together, you have demonstrated EVERY loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive... morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish...!I literally cheered at this speech. It seemed like the only sane response to Nicholson's character.
This is great, I thought. Surely the plot will be that the demon is trying to get to the unknown-to-themselves witches and their powers, but they're too strong and too smart to fall for him. NOPE. NO. NOT AT ALL WHAT HAPPENS. Instead, all the women fall for and sleep with the demon (Alex is immediately seduced after her speech as he mansplains that she is a repressed housewife who should sleep with him for personal empowerment reasons) and then they all become a strange polyamorous-polygamist family.
From this moment until nearly the end of the film, we don't see Alex's or Sukie's children again. The only "family" they seem to have is each other and this demon. The women all become more sensual and confident. They start realizing they have powers again, this time floating when they get into laughing fits and dancing in the air together. The demon just laughs and claps and encourages them, and they all treat is as normal, fulfilling, and not at all creepy, supernatural, or isolating.
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| Fly, my pretties... |
It is about this time that the newspaper editor's wife starts having a sense of "great evil" and tries to warn her husband. It starts with a small premonition of evil, and her husband laughs at her. Later she descends into a state of ranting and raving about the demonic powers she can feel in the town, and her husband literally calls her "hysterical." As she get's worse, she practically goes into a trance and says that the demon has seized on three women "for their power" and that he wants them so that they can "bear him sons."
Okay, gross, but this is great, I thought. Surely the plot will be that, despite the men not listening to this woman, the three friends/witches will learn about the newspaper editor's wife's rantings and will eventually see what they've been drawn into. It'll stop the demon-spawn-pregnancy plot and the women will team up with the editor's wife to save the day. NOPE. NO. NOT AT ALL WHAT HAPPENS. Instead, through demonic influence the newspaper editor MURDERS HIS WIFE. What's worse is that the three friends/witches feel like it's their fault, and the movie framing seems to agree with them (rather than the way I would interpret the murder: the demon's masculine energy further corrupts and makes more extreme other masculine energy, turning it into hate and violence). The camera lingers as each woman blames themselves for the woman's death and falls into a state of cliché depression; Alex literally is eating ice cream in bed in one scene.
The demon, feeling neglected by the fact that the women are focusing on their own emotions rather than him and his sex-party isolated world, lashes out by making their worst fears come to life. This essentially proves to Alex, Sukie, and Jane what the viewing audience already knew: this man is a literal demon.
Realizing that they can't reject him without getting harmed, but also knowing they can't go back to how things were knowing that Nicholson's character is a creature of great evil, they decide to embrace their power and banish him with a spell. Yes, 1.5 hours into this movie, the Witches of Eastwick finally witch!
This is great, I thought. The witches are embracing their powers and will banish the demon, realizing that empowerment and strength was inside them, and not their relationship with the demon, all along.
And... sort of. This is definitely the closest to what I wanted from this movie and the best series of scenes in the film.
The three women make a wax doll and use a series of potions, pins, and feathers to cast spells aimed at the demon. They hurt him a lot, some on purpose... and some by accident when they try to clean up their spell. That last part takes a bit of the kick out of the scene, as it seems like "oh you silly women, continuing to do magic when you don't mean to!"
Cutting away from the women, the demon's human disguise starts to slip, and honestly for the first time I understood the Jack Nicholson casting. I didn't believe him at all as a suave millionaire from New York, but I believed him a lot as an angry demon. Nicholson acts the hell out of it as he screams and yells at the sky, terrorizes the town's people around him, and flails around helplessly as the spells go to work. It's a sight to behold and really, really entertaining.
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| And he looks like this along the way |
This is great, I thought! The women are winning! Sure, the other lady who the men should have listened to is dead, but the witches will banish the demon and win the day. And they do, kind of. Nicholson's character turns into a big monster with some HILARIOUS, 80's claymation and practical effects, and ultimately is banished into an energy portal.
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| LOOK AT IT!!! |
Now, if the movie had ended right there, I probably would have given it a 2.5/5 bites. It was dumb, flawed, and weird, but the climax was fun. It would have been just okay. But NOPE. NO. NOT AT ALL WHAT HAPPENS. Instead, the movie continues and flashes forward eighteen months where the three women/witches ALL HAVE LITTLE BOY BABIES and are raising them in the demon's mansion.
Yes, the demon spawn were all born, and there are signs that they all have powers. As Alex, Sukie, and Jane take care of the babies, finally with Sukie and Alex's original children able to be seen in the background playing, Jane admits that SHE MISSES THE DEMON and the other witches reluctantly agree.
WHAT??? HOW? HE WAS THE WORST. HE WAS TERRIBLE. HE WAS A LITERAL DEMON! WHAT FREAKING QUALITIES DO YOU MISS?!?!?! EVERYTHING ABOUT HIM WAS THE! LITERAL! WORST!
Anyway, an area with televisions in the mansion shows Nicholson's demon appearing on the screens and cooing at the demon children. They all smile and laugh and clap, happy to see their papa. Nicholson's demon is grinning wildly: he's WON. Banished or not, the demon children were born. The movie ends with the witches turning off the televisions... which I guess is supposed to be feminist? I don't even know any more.
Folks... I just... what.... what the hell.
I don't even know what muddled message this movie was supposed to send. The film is loosely based on a John Updike novel and, according to The Guardian, is "a satire on baby-boomer liberationism" and the "idea of sexuality as a kind of witchcraft is pitched as an ironic exaggeration of a small town's fear of liberated women." Now, I haven't read the novel, so I can't comment as to that interpretation, but I know that such a reading does not work AT ALL for the film.
Also, by the end of the film, in this movie that stars three amazing women in its lead, I actually don't think that the movie passes the Bechdel Test. For those who don't know, the Bechdel test (or sometimes "Bechdel rule") is a measure of the representation of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women, with names, who talk to each other about a topic other than a man. While we clearly have more than two women with names in this film who do talk to each other, every conversation revolves around men in some way, from Walter, to their ex-or-dead husbands, to Nicholson's demon, to the demon baby boys at the end (which turns into a conversation about Nicholson's demon). It is seemingly shown that these women's characters entirely revolve around men, with no empowerment or full identity on their own.
This is exactly the opposite of the message I want out of a witch movie. Don't even waste your time with this one if you like anything about witches or badass women. It'll just infuriate you. If you at least want to see Michelle Pfeiffer as a badass witch in a sisterhood coven of witches, just go watch Stardust. It'll make you so much happier.
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| A much better movie with much better, badass witches |
I think I may need a pallet cleanser after this one. Ugh.
Final rating: 1.5/5 bites
(the only reason it's not a 1 is because of the climax and the film-making quality itself)
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