Lately, there’s been a run of movie sequels aimed at women of my generation.
“Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.” “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” “Freakier Friday” And now, “Practical Magic 2.”
Some of these movies are better than others, and I – again, the target audience – have had a good time at most of them. But they have a ceiling. And to be quite honest, it’s not a very high one.
I don’t know when studios started to believe that the only way to get women to come out to the theater was to prey on their nostalgia (especially since “Barbie” did so well – although I guess, for all its strengths, that’s also praying on a certain type of nostalgia). But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Original star-driven, female-centric stories – about friendship, sisterhood, and the like – have all but disappeared. When they are made, they’re usually smaller films. But lately, when they’re big – despite the success of movies like “Book Club,” or “Little Women” – they tend to be sequels. The powers that be assume we don’t actually care about Anne Hathaway or Meryl Streep enough to come out and see them, but we do care about “The Devil Wears Prada,” and we’ll shill out our money for that.
I don’t know how right they are in that assumption. And “Practical Magic” is kind of the perfect example for how these sequels rest on the laurels of their performers, and the audience’s relationship to those performers, and squeak by on everything else.
Following the events of the first film, the Owens sisters, Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Gillian (Nicole Kidman) are still living in the same Massachusetts town as their aunts Jet (Dianne Wiest) and Francis (Stockard Channing), where everyone knows they’re witches and is totally cool with that.
But, after the death of her second husband – which proved that the curse on the Owens sisters that kills anyone they fall in love with was still kicking – Sally rejected magic and cast a spell that made her daughters Antonia (Maisie Williams) and Kylie (Joey King) forget about magic altogether. But when Kylie grows up and falls in love with a young man who is promptly hit by a car and goes into a coma, Sally has to come clean – sending Kylie on a quest that could have catastrophic consequences.
The best parts about “Practical Magic” are exactly what you’d expect – watching Kidman and Bullock play off of each other. There’s a comfort and a comedic chemistry between the two of them that riffs with ease, and the movie is smart enough to remind us a couple of times how good these two women are – particularly Bullock – with a little bit of slapstick. Bullock (Sally was always more of a main character than Gillian) also gets a chance to flex her romantic comedy chops, and love interest Lee Pace is more than up to the challenge.
Outside of that connection between Kidman and Bullock, however, “Practical Magic” is over-bloated and weighed down by a pretty convoluted plot (and really, it’s a travesty that a “Practical Magic” sequel is more concerned with plot mechanics than it is with random margarita drinking sequences). The film looks markedly bad, and besides King, who plays the lovesick daughter on a mission that almost gets the whole family killed, the rest of the actresses are sidelined almost completely. Williams and Channing, in particular, almost never leave the dull blue hospital room that houses Kylie’s comatose boyfriend. It’s a baffling cinematic decision.
And yet, I still had a pretty good time watching two actresses who I love have fun. I’m not an idiot – I understand that from a monetary perspective, it’s easier for Hollywood to bet on an ostensibly sure thing. But the fact that we have to go through all of these contrivances and nostalgia ploys simply to watch Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman have a laugh onscreen together feels a little preposterous. There must be an easier way that results in a better movie, and I’m begging somebody to find it.
