What women (really) want
Once branded a feminist, director Diane English warns 'The Women' isn't what you think
EDGARTOWN -Diane English remembers clearly the morning of May 20, 1992, when actress Candice Bergen phoned to say that she had better go have a look at the front page of The
There, in a story about a campaign speech by Vice President Dan Quayle, English found her Emmy-winning sitcom, "Murphy Brown," linked to an erosion of family and moral values that Quayle implied had contributed to, among other things, violence and looting in the wake of Rodney King's beating - all because the show's namesake newswoman (played by Bergen) chose to have a baby out of wedlock.
Media around the world piled on the ensuing controversy.
"I felt like I was in a Preston Sturges movie," English recalled recently while sitting for an interview in the sun porch of her spectacularly inviting Martha's Vine yard summer home. "I was in this other world and everybody was calling me and I had photographers outside my house [in Southern California]. Dan Rather wanted me to come and sit at the news desk and open the news. . . . It was crazy."
The writer-director issued just one brief statement in the heat of the moment (punctuated with the line: "If [Quayle] believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he'd better make sure abortion remains safe and legal.") Still, in less time than it once took suffragettes to chain themselves to government properties, she was so effectively branded a feminist mouthpiece that 16 years later she still carries the stamp into her first feature film, "The Women," now playing at theaters nationwide.
But moviegoers expecting this diva-packed remake (featuring Bergen in a small role) to be the equivalent of a "Murphy Brown" episode writ large, will be most shocked by the conventional choices it makes. True to its 1930s inspiration, beneath all the playful sniping, English's contemporary screenplay holds marriage in high esteem. It testifies that, yes, women can have it all in the 21st century, but having it all is exhausting and not nearly as much fun as hanging out with your girlfriends. And for all its talk about high-maintenance relationships with men, the new movie is described by its maker as primarily a "love story between two straight women" - a focus that probably says more about Diane English at age 60 than any snarky snippet of dialogue the Buffalo-born former Vogue scribe could have written.
These days, she's not looking to make any statements ("I always say, I just write my little stories," she insists) but she is more than happy to join the recent parade of bosom buddy movies that includes "Sex and the City," "Mamma Mia!," and "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2." However unintentional, it may turn out that the most subversive thing Murphy Brown's creator could have done was lend her voice to this unexpectedly robust summer chorus. If the public responds, Hollywood - already persuaded to triple her film's marketing budget - might even have to keep the parade marching for a while. And that would suit English just fine.
Female friendship on film
"The Women," shot largely in the Boston area last year, is an update of George Cukor's all-female 1939 movie starring Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Crawford, which successfully adapted Clare Boothe Luce's hit play of the same era. Both early works focused on a delicious skewering of Manhattan society women, boldly executed even with Cukor and his screenwriters tap dancing around the Hays Code. There was also a 1956 big-screen remake called "The Opposite Sex," a campy June Allyson vehicle with leading men and musical numbers added to the mix, but it's notable only for the scene where Allyson slaps the earrings right off Joan Collins's head.
English's film is less about high society than it is about a diverse group of female friends. Its hand-wringing is mainly over a betrayal that happens between lead characters Mary (Meg Ryan) and Sylvie (Annette Bening), which is at least as devastating as any male-female breakup in the movie. Where Luce's women seemed "very hateful to each other" when Bening first saw the play decades ago, the actress said by phone that she liked English's screenplay because it asked "what do women do to sustain each other?"
"It has a few things to say about modern womanhood," she continued, "but in the end it's a comedy about female friendship."
That presents some familiar targets.
In every version of Luce's send-up, males are the weaker sex, at least where it comes to resisting temptation. The key plot point involves an affair blamed mostly on a voluptuous department store perfume salesgirl who's gotten her claws into a married man. When the man's wife finds out by way of a gossipy manicurist, relationships are tested and even temporarily dissolved, but in all cases (here's where you should avert your eyes if you don't want to know anything about the new movie's ending), the betrayer ultimately gets a second chance.
Hey, it worked for the "Sex and the City" movie.
English cites research showing that most marriages do survive nonserial infidelity. She makes her film's unseen cad (no men appear onscreen in this one, even as background images) sympathetic and contrite. And she empowers her movie's cheated-on wife (Ryan) by sculpting her into a successful fashion designer, which puts a keen spin on the interminable Technicolor fashion show, courtesy of Adrian, in Cukor's mostly black-and-white production.
"I think it reflects reality, I really do," English says of her movie's take on contemporary affairs. "It takes a long time to rebuild trust, but it can happen if both parties want it to."
The power of choice
In the dining room of English's Vineyard retreat, where pond and ocean views abound, a side table is laden with framed photographs.
One snapshot commemorates Julia Roberts's cameo in the 1998 star-studded final episode of "Murphy Brown." Another pictures the director's beloved American Paint horse, a fixture at her ranch in Hidden Valley, Calif., where she and husband Joel Shukovsky (a producer) find West Coast sanctuary from the Hollywood scene. Then there's the black-and-white photo of Hillary Clinton mingling with guests at this Edgartown house that "Murphy Brown" built; needless to say, that photograph has taken on a bit more significance lately.
Though English stops short of calling herself an FOH (Friend of Hill) - "I don't pick up the phone and ask Hillary out to dinner," she says - the photograph's prominent placement in her home makes a personal statement that is very much in keeping with her movie. "The Women" is about surviving and even thriving after a very public infidelity. It is about the power of choice. And it is also about women needing rock-solid support if they are to permanently shatter glass ceilings, including the one that sits low above a female filmmaker trying to shop an all-female movie.
When English signed on to write the remake for New Line Cinema in 1994, it was to star Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts, possibly directed by James L. Brooks. The film had strong initial backing, then it didn't (after New Line bombed with "Town & Country"), and then it entered a special purgatory reserved for "chick flicks" (English chafes at the term) that can't guarantee they'll be the next "Nine to Five" or "The First Wives Club." Ryan and Roberts moved on. Numerous other actresses were rumored to be interested in starring, but English says none were ever formally attached to the stalled project. The turning point came in 2003 when English hosted a "Sex and the City" viewing party at her Vineyard home, where fellow island resident Victoria Pearman, a producer in partnership with Mick Jagger, urged her to buy "The Women" from New Line and agreed to help raise the $15 million or so needed to finally get it made.
Principal cast members - now Ryan, Bening, Debra Messing, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Eva Mendes - were brought to English's Edgartown house for five days of rehearsals and bonding. Ryan, who also has property nearby, helped flesh out her role ("We did have to modernize Mary; she needed to be woken up," the actress recently explained by phone) and adlibbed a key line that happens just before her character stops being a dishrag: "I've spent an entire lifetime trying to be everything to everybody," Mary complains, "and somebody's always disappointed."
"I think all of us are after a balance in ourselves and to have that reflected out there in society," Ryan commented in our phone interview.
English sees her job as constructing the right mirrors, with fun-house-style exaggerations for comedic effect.
She believes it's important not to be too reverent when re-envisioning someone else's work. Her next film is expected to be an adaptation of Erica Jong's seminal "Fear of Flying," and she is as unlikely to be ruled by the feminist legacy of that novel as she was by the legacy of "Murphy Brown."
"Feminism has always been a bad word because it implies an aggressiveness, a polarization between men and women . . . that if you're a feminist you don't love men, that you can't wear makeup - all of these very old-fashioned ideas that came out of the original women's movement," English says. "But a feminist is anybody who thinks there can be a woman president."
And maybe, in a business increasingly driven by box office, a feminist film is anything those people pay to see.
Janice Page can be reached at jpage@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog. 