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.