Witch way to the chick's flick and finally an Oscar award?
Witch way to the chick's flick and finally an Oscar award?
By David Schiller
JAKARTA (JP): The overwhelming success of last year's Titanic
proved to Hollywood a new axiom of the movie industry for the
1990s: if you can build a better chick's flick, approximately
half the females on the planet will beat a path to your box
office door, dragging their boyfriends and husbands, kicking and
screaming, behind them.
Practical Magic, starring the beautiful Sandra Bullock (Speed
I/II, The Net, While You Were Sleeping) and Nicole Kidman (To Die
For, Batman Forever, The Peacemaker), is a romantic drama that
targets this particular audience, in addition to the public's
long-term fascination with witchcraft, sorcery and other things
that might go bump in the night.
The film tells the fairytale-like story of two modern-day
sibling witches who are orphaned and taken in by their spinster
witch aunts (played by Stockard Channing, of Six Degrees of
Separation fame, and Dianne Weist, a two-time best supporting
actress Oscar winner under the direction of Woody Allen). They
grow up in a picturesque Massachusetts seaside village, practice
their magic spells, endure the prejudice of the local
townspeople, and eventually learn the cruel curse that will
befall any man truly loved by an "Owens woman" -- when the
ticking of the deathwatch beetle is heard, he is one not long for
this world.
Even as children, the sister's polar personalities are clearly
illustrated. Sally Owen (played by Sandra Bullock) is the dark-
haired, responsible one who swears she'll "never fall in love"
and refrains from using magic. Gillian Owen (Nicole Kidman) is
the blonde wild child who "can't wait to fall in love" and more
readily exercises her mystical gifts. But having sex is not the
same thing as falling head-over-broomsticks in love, so not all
their romantic relationships are necessarily doomed to tragedy.
The girls reach maturity, with each proceeding to search for
love, life and fulfillment in their own different ways. Sally
stays at home, marries and starts a family, while Gillian leaves
town in the fast lane, latching up with a dark, psychotic lover
in the process. Someone gets killed and the two sisters reunite
in order to strengthen their bonds and keep the authorities and
other threatening things at bay. And then things really do get a
bit strange...
Given the title of the film, it is unusual just how much drama
and how little magic actually happens in Practical Magic. Sure,
there are love potions, mugs of coffee that stir themselves and
resurrections from the dead; but this is the story of two sisters
with a very special bond who just happen to be witches (not the
other way around). The magic is merely a vehicle that helps
enrich the larger themes of sisterhood and female romantic
fulfillment.
Similar to The Witches of Eastwick, the witchcraft is
presented as something very cute and funny, but also very real --
and, at times, a thing that can backfire and turn very nasty. In
one scene a pre-exorcism get-together with the village gals
assumes all the frivolity of a suburban Tupperware party. Then
the witches circle forms, the incantations start, and suddenly
the scene more closely resembles one from Roman Polanski's
Macbeth than an expanded episode of the TV-sitcom Bewitched.
Practical Magic is only the third film for director Griffin
Dunne whose other works include the romantic comedy Addicted to
Love (1997) and the Janis Joplin short film Duke of Groove (1995)
(which was nominated for an Academy Award). He is actually better
known to Hollywood as a comic character actor, whose supernatural
film experience dates all the way back to the 1981 horror film An
American Werewolf in London (in which he plays a teenager slain
by a werewolf, who comes back as a hilarious spook that slowly
decomposes throughout the film). The dreamy cinematography for
Practical Magic, credited to Andrew Dunn (apparently no relation
to the director), is one of the strongest features of the film.
His images sometimes assume a light ethereal quality that can
occasionally lull the viewer into moods of pastoral bliss. This
is further enhanced by a very tasty and soulful soundtrack of
folk-flavored orchestration, and classic cuts such as Joni
Mitchell's A Case of You and Harry Nilsson's Coconut, to which
the witches brew up a truly wicked batch of margaritas. Not to
forget other well known cinematic sorceresses, Dunne pays a
heartwarming tribute to both Mary Poppins and the Wicked Witch of
the West in the final scene of the film.
All in all, it is doubtful that Practical Magic will be
nominated for any Oscars, and more than a few male viewers will
be more than disappointed with the film's lack of action, horror
or a well-developed male lead. But Nicole Kidman and Sandra
Bullock have seldom looked more lovely; the film is sweet, light
and funny, and may be just the right kind of practical magic to
arouse the romantic alchemy within a couple sitting side-by-side
in a movie theater.