Bewitched

I'm going to try and squeeze an entire review out of this, but my review of Nora Ephron's summer comedy Bewitched boils down to the following statement: It's not at all funny.

The film could, I suppose, have been funny. The premise - that the unknown female star of a new remake of the TV show "Bewitched" is a real-life actual witch - is a bit thin but not impossible to work with. The strong ensemble cast, particularly leads Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman, is filled with naturally talented, charismatic performers. And Kidman can even do the Elizabeth Montgomery nose-wiggle thing right.

It's just that the movie is not at all funny. It's labored, sometimes confusing, way over the top, silly and corny...but just not funny.

This is Nora Ephron's fault, I'm sorry to say. I have seen her interviewed and even met her in person once, and she strikes me as funny and intelligent. And I like her scripts for When Harry Met Sally and My Blue Heaven well enough. But the "comedies" which she writes and directs are never funny, ever. They are always simplistic, sitcom-ish, hacky affairs full of old jokes, obvious song choices, goofy montages, predictable stories and thin, cartoonish caricatures in place of relatable characters. Though it's hardly her most egregious effort (that would be 2000's utterly loathsome John Travolta vehicle Lucky Numbers), Bewitched is regrettably more of the same.



My old screenwriting professor used to say that romantic comedies were the easiest genre to write, which is largely why I have devoted the vast majority of my writing career to them thus far. Basically, he would say, your entire film is already written: two people Meet Cute, they fall for each other, but some obstacle is in their way keeping them from being together. During the course of the film, they solve that problem, even though it looks for a while like they can't, and they live happily ever after (unless there's a sequel, in which case some new problem pops up keeping them from remaining happily together).

The idea is, you keep the problem itself as simple as possible, so you can devote most of your time to making these characters funny and interesting. It's rarely the intricacies of the plot that people remember about romantic comedies. It's the personalities that fill the movie. That's what sets your film apart from the formula. So you come up with a problem that seems important to the characters, but actually can be dispensed in a few scenes of exposition.

This is the success behind Ephron's script for When Harry Met Sally. It doesn't really bother to even come up with a specific problem keeping Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) apart - they're just friends and don't think of one another that way, until at the end they do. Brilliant!

With Bewitched, she has gone in the complete opposite direction. The story is so twisty and weird and complicated, there's no time for any, well, good jokes or funny little character moments. Ferrell plays big-time actor Jack Wyatt, whose career is on the rocks after a much-discussed flop called A Night in Katmandu. He's going to star in a new sitcom version of the classic series "Bewitched," and wants Samantha to be played by an unknown actress he can easily outshine.

So they hire Isabelle (Nicole Kidman), a witch who has recently given up witchcraft against the advice of her playboy warlock father (Michael Caine...yeah, for real...)

I'm gonna stop right there. If you're an actor and you want to easily outshine your co-star...you gonna hire Nicole Kidman? She's goddamn gorgeous. It's ridiculous. You hire Nicole Kidman if you want someone unbelievably hot in your show that's going to attract everyone's attention. Duh.

But it gets more complicated. Isabelle finds out really quickly that Jack has only pretended to value her contribution, and he really wants to sideline her and hog all the jokes himself. So she puts a love spell on him that makes him obsessed with her, wanting to give her all the good lines. But then that's unsatisfying so she unhexes him (turning back time in the process) and starts over to win him to her side through lively conversation and montages wherein they walk along a beach at sunset.

You see where I'm going with this...By the hour mark, the goings-on in Bewitched have become so muddled, you're not sure what Isabelle's powers are, whether Jack really likes her or not, whether he's an angry and pampered star or a sweet down-to-earth guy, how Isabelle really feels about him or what possible relevance this bullshit could have for anyone anywhere at any time.

Kidman, Ferrell and the rest of the ensemble (which also includes David Alan Grier, Jason Schwartzman, Shirley McLaine, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carrell, Mo Rocca and Michael Badalucco) really do try their best to make the most of this material. Ferrell even squeezes out one or two genuine laughs in between all the unfunny "shenanigans." At one point, he snarkily tells a waitress to leave him alone, suggesting she go see if the other table is finished with their hummus.

But the way he says "hummus" to her, HOO-MAS, is funny! Why? I don't know. Maybe just because it's unexpected and spontaneous, adjectives I couldn't use to describe any other facet of Nora Ephron movies. I just don't get her whole take on comedy. The movies are already so ridiculously silly and unbelievable, why not just go all out?

Why even try to make a real movie about a stuck-up actor whose co-star is a witch, filled with all these generic, half-baked "behind-the-scenes" Hollywood industry parodies? I mean, why even ask a really funny, engaging actor like Jason Schwartzman to play a slick asshole talent agent? That part is so tired, those jokes are so ancient, having him play the character any other way would be better.

What I'm saying is, why not forget about the tired constraints of the formula and just make the films looser, let the actors breathe a little, try and get the most jokes possible out of the material? That strikes me as the attitude Ferrell himself and his collaborator Adam McKay took with Anchorman, a film that's just as formulaic and trite as Bewitched, and which features a few of the same cast members, but which is also pretty frequently hilarious.