The Women	by George Sax

Clare Boothe’s waspishly comic 1936 play, The Women, with its famous all-female cast, is an antique, but it’s still good for some guilty laughs, although to enjoy them requires a little attitude adjustment. You’ve got to relinquish any nagging concerns about political correctness and gender ethics.

Meg Ryan in The Women

Not only has writer-director Diane English neglected to check these ideological qualms at the door, she’s tried to impose them on Boothe’s play. And the results are ungainly and kind of weird.

Boothe (who later married publishing magnate Henry Luce and added his surname to hers) wrote a wickedly nasty little dramatic exposé of the overprivileged, smugly cosseted but financially dependent Manhattan society matrons of her day. She lampooned these ladies who lunched with some effrontery, if little hard-driven malice.

English, a Western New York native who was responsible for the TV sitcom Murphy Brown, has eviscerated the play and reconstituted it as a feminist comedy. It’s doubtful that anyone could manage this trick, and English certainly hasn’t. Boothe’s women were primarily idling, self-indulgent Park Avenue backstabbers whose diversions included egging their “friends” into divorce proceedings, while clucking and simpering about the duplicity of men.

Boothe’s inspired conceit was to set The Women in a protected women’s world into which no male intrudes during the play’s course. This segregation only enhanced the play’s jaundiced, jokey premise.

English has retained this device, and she may have thought she had no real choice, but her movie is peculiar as a result. This version’s females are almost as advantaged as their literary ancestors, but they’re out in the 21st-century world, engaging and competing with men. The partial exception is the two-timed married heroine (Meg Ryan in the role filled by the regally suffering Norma Shearer in George Cukor’s 1940 movie adaptation). She’s a suburban New York stay-at-home mother of one, a charity fundraiser who discovers from her garrulously empty-headed manicurist at Saks that her husband has a mistress.

This part roughly tracks the original, but for the surrounding gaggle of gossipy, mean-mouthed, society hens English has substituted a trio of true-blue pals, led by a fashion magazine editor (Annette Bening), who are nothing but supportive.

Bening’s character finds her job is on the line because magazine ads and revenues aren’t increasing, but this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with her gender. However, the scenes in the editorial offices underline the foolishness of English’s revamping. There are only women working there. This is a fashion rag and there are no gay men around? Hello? What was English thinking?

But the adoption of the original’s all-female cast is given its most jarringly strange application in some New York street scenes, as Bening and Ryan traverse city sidewalks amid thronging crowds that are entirely female. Likewise, the scenes in Saks.

Boothe was employing a stylized exaggeration, pointing to the rarified, unreal milieu her women inhabited. English only succeeds in creating a surreally silly mise-en-scene.

There’s also the problem of her annoyingly skewed, implicit social assumptions. The play and first movie version would doubtless have been obnoxious to any engagé leftists who paid it any mind, but escapist Broadway and Hollywood fare about the haute bourgeoisie was widely accepted in the Depression years. English, on the other hand, wants to convey a message of sisterly solidarity and identity politics, but only, it seems, to women who have Saks charge accounts and live-in housekeepers. The only really ethically inferior character is the husband-stealing shopgirl (Eva Mendes).

Ironically, the class-biased moral distinctions are sharper in this version than the original.