"The First Wives Club" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL October 26, 1996 I'm running a little bit behind on my film reviews these days, and I apologize for reviewing things that have been out there in the theaters for several weeks before I get around to reviewing them. Today's film is, however, still playing in the Tampa Bay area, so, if I were recommending it, you'd still be able to get to it this weekend. The film is "The First Wives Club" and, while I think it does have some admirable features, it's a film that turned out to be so much less than it could have been, my recommendation is tepid at best. This is a good example of what I'm calling, these days, a comeuppance film, and there have been so many of them recently among Hollywood films--some very gentle and some (as in "Bound" that I reviewed last week) quite brutal. This one is somewhere in the middle. None of the men getting their comeuppance is physically harmed, but they certainly take some brutal hits in the pocketbook. Hollywood is as notorious for preferring younger women as are the middle-aged men who leave their first wives for a younger model. Female stars after they reach a certain age, don't always make a smooth career transition into middle age or beyond. So this film's very existence as a big budget highly publicized number that stars three women who are well beyond Hollywood's normal age range for star treatment is, in itself, a bit of sweet revenge. The members of the "first wives club" of the title are played by Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton, (with a cameo appearance at the very beginning of the film by Stockard Channing ). Channing's character is a college friend of the others who is so devastated by her husband's leaving her that she commits suicide, and this becomes the motivating factor that brings the other three together at her funeral and gives them the impetus to resist submitting to the same kind of devastated reaction in response to the break- ups of their own marriages. With these three stars, however, the film obviously is going to take a comic look at the situation, though in so doing it never trivializes the seriousness of this experience which is so commonplace in the lives of many women. The film is based on a novel by Olivia Goldsmith, and media reports indicate that it has received a reception among middle-aged upper-middle-class white women in places like Westwood and Scarsdale, nearly as enthusiastic as that which Waiting to Exhale received from Black women when the it opened, which is to say, full houses and much audience identification. I must say I found myself wishing that not just the basic storyline but also the screenplay had been written by a saavy woman screenwriter and directed by, say, a Nora Ephron, for I thought that many of the opportunities for humor fell flat and that not much sense of genuine bonding and caring really took place among the women. The result was that the film is not as funny or emotionally true as it ought to be. This is, without a doubt, a film whose central plot feature is to see to it that the former husbands of the three protagonists get the comeuppance they so richly deserve. The film goes beyond individual revenge and the personal satisfaction that may bring, however, to some sort of a broader feminist vision: once they extract their pound of flesh from their ex's, the first wives use the money to found a center for abused women and children in lower Manhattan. In several respects the plot here is similar to director Susan Seidelman s 1991 film version of Fay Weldon s novel She-Devil. However, that film was a vengeful (and funny) black comedy, a devastating social satire of American sexual mores, and a woman's revenge fantasy that made most men and a lot of patriarchal-loyalist women squirm in their seats. As a result, it did not find much accepatance among the American film-going public, "The First Wives Club" covers much of the same territory, but in the hands of your basic Hollywood male filmmakers, it pales in comparison; for this very reason, however, it seems to be reaching a much larger audience. But it's tepid at best. The filmmakers obviously wanted it to seem to be a feminist-film, but it's as if they either don't really mean it, or don't know how to do it. So they do things like throwing in a brief glimpse of Gloria Steinem rather than making a film in which women love and care about one another or have any idea why the things that happened to them have happened. Too bad, because, in the right hands, this could have been a good vehicle for using humor to make some important points to a mass audience. Instead, the film too often just falls flat. Go rent "She Devil" instead. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1996. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.