SEX AND THE CITY, the television series, was all about fashion labels and sex. Delivered in tantalizing half-hour gobbets, it was the perfect fantasy antidote to real life. The women were fabulous, the stories were glamorous, the dialogue wittily impudent, and the glorification of the trivial was a deliciously wicked guilty pleasure. This is a show, after all, that spent an entire episode fretting over Charlotte’s too great attachment to her vibrator and 30 minutes was all such musings required. SEX AND THE CITY, the movie, wants to take its over two-hour running time and be profound. Big mistake. These were and are women who were and are rabidly vapid and superficial. To inject emotional depth into the formula is to miss the point entirely, even if the mortal sins of neglecting to keeps one’s bikini wax current and the gently rounded tummy resulting from a bout of emotional eating are addressed with suitable horror. The ladies are types, not three-dimensional characters, and trying to find the third dimension here is a fruitless quest.
As far as fashion goes, it stays true to form and delivers almost immediately. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), former sex-columnist and now successful author narrates a brief history of our ladies while going through the first of several costume montages. For those who need the introduction, the ladies are stay-at-sumptuous-home mom Charlotte (Kristin Davis), acerbic attorney Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), and libidinous publicist Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall). The film catches it up with them five years after we last saw them, which is also five years since the series ended. Miranda is a harried working mother and just as dyspeptic as ever, Charlotte is basking in the throes of marital and maternal bliss, Samantha has become bi-coastal and monogamous, having settled in LA to nurture along boy-toy Smith’s television career. Carrie herself has settled into a comfortable exclusive if unmarried relationship with Big (Chris Noth) the wealthy financier who broke her heart in ways large and small so many times during the series five-year run that only hard-core fans of the series could ever hope to keep count. It’s all going swimmingly until the girls go to a jewelry auction, the pieces the detritus of a great love gone wrong, and it gets everybody to thinking, and that’s when things get complicated for the year-long arc of film, and it’s also when the pithy premise becomes just so much sub-par chick-lit.
The film throws in an assistant for Carrie, played by Jennifer Hudson, who is great in the part, but whose character’s reason for being there is nebulous aside from providing yet another expository device over and above the other ladies. The actresses are not uniformly up to the challenge either. Nixon, given the shallowest of outlines, creates all-but from scratch a serviceable complexity. Davis and Catrall’s characters are saucer-eyed cartoons and they work within that contraint. The least successful is Parker herself, who struts couture in alarmingly high heels with a swagger and panache that are truly admirable, but who expresses real feelings mechanically. As though she had seen an illustrated manual of how to emote and followed its line drawings without deviation or imagination.
As for the sex, There are a few torrid scenes, only one of them involving our ladies and it’s not Samantha, though her storyline includes a novel use for sushi. The problem here is not having enough of it. The torrid scene? It belongs to Miranda, whose off-the-cuff comment in bed with hubby Steve mid-coitus sets her storyline in motion. Charlotte’s obligatory sheet scene is supposed to be sweet, and is, but it is also that worst of bedroom mistakes, dull. Carrie is limited to nuzzles, kisses, and a little post-coitus glowing.
As for the men of the piece, they aren’t important in and of themselves. They are fodder for the endless conversations the ladies have over the phone, over drinks, over meals, over and over and over again. They have no separate identities. The most egregious error of the entire film is what has happened to Mr. Big. He has been turned into a bigger cream puff than the acres of tulle Carrie sports at one point and is just as insubstantial. Noth, an actor who as a rule oozes a game and cocky self-confidence seems just a little unsure how to proceed, but goes through the motions making Carrie miserable and offering more fodder for conversation.
SEX AND THE CITY was never a showcase for what is best about being human, or about being female for that matter. At its best, it was about skewering the absurd triviality of trendiness. It was about revisting the emotional intensity and effusive immaturity of adolescence, which is where these ladies, all eminently successful in their grown-up careers, have firmly remained despite the passing years. At its worst, it sent decidedly mixed messages about sexual freedom, particularly with the punitive subtext to Samantha’s storyline, when, in the final season, the most sexually free of the four came down with an illness that attacked her secondary sexual characteristics. The ladies are in their 40s now, and moving them along emotionally would make sense in the real world. Alas, that’s not now nor ever has it ever been where they lived, and it’s certainly not where their audience wanted to go.
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