When George Cukor directed The Women in 1939, the very notion of an exclusively distaff drama was positively radical. Seventy years and countless high-gloss you-go-girl movies later, it’s considerably less novel. And it doesn’t help that, in every way that counts, Diane English’s long-gestating update is retrograde: the fashions may be cutting-edge, but the attitudes are dispiritingly conservative. Meg Ryan’s character, a Wall Street wife with designs on being a designer, realizes her dream (her colour scheme having apparently been derived from a White Stripes video marathon). But she’s only truly fulfilled when her philandering (and, of course, unseen) husband decides to break off his affair with a Saks salesgirl (Eva Mendes, who, to put it mildly, is no Joan Crawford).
It’s an entirely typical trajectory for the female lead in a glossy Hollywood movie. What’s really offensive, though, is the way that Ryan and co-stars Annette Bening (the neurotic career woman), Debra Messing (the comically fertile multiple mom) and Jada Pinkett Smith (pulling double token duty as a black lesbian) are held up as examples of “real women” as opposed to fashion-mag waifs, as if the sight of beautiful movie stars playing impossibly affluent, proudly frivolous socialites was somehow a body-and-self-image wakeup call. This film is ridiculous — the average episode of Sex and the City plays like Italian neo-realist drama by comparison.