The Women
Elizabeth and I watched The Women this weekend.
That’s a mistake we won’t make twice.
We rented this through the bountiful cornucopia of digital content that is Comcast OnDemand. We had decided, of a Saturday evening, that we were in the mood for a movie, and since our PS3 was doing sweet bugger all on the streaming front, we decided to go the cable route. We made some popcorn and, after flipping through pages of movies we had either never heard of or had zero interest in, Elizabeth came across this one and pulled up the preview.
Judging by the trailer, it looked like it could be a pretty funny film. “This is the one,” we agreed, and settled onto the couch with our now nearly-finished bowl of popcorn to watch.
We didn’t so much watch this as were subjected to it. It was one of those movies that was funny precisely four times, and all four of those times had been carefully shoehorned into the trailer. The rest was just meandering, malcontent, self-absorbed drivel. About halfway through I found myself no longer caring about the main characters and their struggles. In fact, I was actively wishing them harm. After they had betrayed, and then been betrayed, and then had a good long talk about betrayal for the umpteenth time, I was pretty much ready to pack it in.
The scene that tore it for me was when two of the characters (and who cares which ones they were, really) were having A Big Fight in the street. Oh, this was a grand to-do, a veritable knock-down-drag-out sort of shouting match. And then, suddenly, and very, very jarringly, they had transitioned into being the best of friends again and were laughing and crying about their respective woes and betrayal, and had a good long talk about their betrayal and oh boy here we go again.
The one interesting thing about this movie is that there are no men in it. The husbands (faithful and otherwise) never make an appearance; the closest they get is when one of the betrayed characters is talking to them on the phone, and we never hear the other side of the conversation. In fact, the only male character is *spoiler alert* the baby that is born to one of the women at the very end of the film, in the most half-assed attempt at a conclusion I’ve seen in many a year.
Movies like this should come with warnings like those over the gates of Dante’s hell: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
