Madeleine Robins January 7th, 2007
This morning my younger daughter watched the film version of Bewitched, written and directed by the usually competant Nora Ephron. It’s an odd nested-metareferential sort of thing: fading film actor with Ego as Big as All Outdoors takes role in a present-day TV updating (meant to be a star vehicle for him) of that 1960s sitcom Bewitched, only the wrinkle is, the woman they hire to play Samantha is…gasp!…a real witch. Slight merriment ensues. While some things were cute–the look and much of the secondary-character casting–the whole film is basically as insubstantial as tissue.
So why even bring it up? Because Nora Ephron wrote it, and Ephron is a normally a better writer than this. What particularly irked me was how she telegraphs each character’s lessons. I couldn’t scrape up any pleasure at the denoument, because I not only knew early on (as one does, with a romantic comedy) that the protagonists would be together at the end, but what trauma/hangup/psychosis each of them would have to overcome to get to the end.
Don’t get me wrong. I was raised on the Ars Poetica (I was a theatre major, after all), and I believe that a satisfying story includes character growth and change, which frequently implies learning a lesson or overcoming some sort of obstacle, which can be read as a lesson or moral. It can be done skillfully, but so often it isn’t; you watch a movie where they establish the hero’s claustrophobia on stage in act one and know that in order to get to the end of the movie he’s going to have to face his demons and conquer them (cue triumphant music). And that’s exactly what happens in Bewitched, so clumsily and obviously that you don’t get a chance to be thrilled by anyone’s transformation. It’s either a very cynical movie or a very artless one, and given Nora Ephron’s track record I’m going for cynical.
How do you do it skillfully? Sometimes by making the lesson to be learned implicit (I’m thinking The Sixth Sense, where Bruce Willis’s psychiatrist not only has to figure out his own status in the world, but has to forgive himself for his prior arrogance and help someone before he can–literally–move on; but you don’t realize what his status is–and thus, what his transformation is–until the very end). Sometimes by raising so many other issues in the character’s life (or raising so many characters with issues) that the audience doesn’t immediately know which transformation is going to be pivotal to the story. Sometimes the story demonstrates that the moment for transformation was years before (I’m thinking of A Long Day’s Journey into Night) and the story is about the consequences of change or its lack. And sometimes–this is tough, but really interesting when a writer pulls it off–you do it by not doing it, by giving the character a chance to transform and have her refuse it (In Death of a Salesman Willy Loman more or less puts his fingers in his ears and hums loudly when realization and transformation approach). In that case it’s the audience’s view of the character which is transformed.
Is it unfair of me to ask that a light romantic comedy have the same resonance as a prize-winning drama? They set out to do different things. But I don’t want to walk away from Bewitched feeling like the writer has so much contempt for me that, after throwing a few sops to the conventions of the form at me, she can cash her paycheck and walk away whistling.
Recap:
Change and transformation, particularly when subtly wrought: excellent.
Heavy handed morals: not so much so.
