Directed by: Michael Patrick King
Written By: Michael Patrick King & Candace Bushnell
Cast: Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, & Cynthia Nixon
Runtime: 148 min.
Rating: R
Trailer

Strange that the number one movie in the cinemas this week is one that is wholly un-cinematic. As Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker last week, Sex and the City the movie is a “TV show on steroids.” The movie is episodic and formless, with no discernable plot or storyline to carry this moviegoer through its absurd running time. At just under two-and-a-half hours, the entire affair fits together like one of the hideous dresses Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) parades in. I have to admit that while not being the biggest fan of the show, I did have an appreciation for the women’s trials and tribulations in love, sex and fashion. For whatever reason, I responded to their fears and desires. The show was able to deliver laughs, wit, charm and a good helping of sex into tiny, thirty-minute morsels that could be easily digested. With the film, however, this simple formula is turned into a monstrosity that devours everything in sight. It’s easy to forgive the show’s transgressions when they were brief and unassuming. On the big screen, those transgressions are mawkish and grating in the most unflattering way possible. Maybe if Michael Patrick King, the film’s writer and director and series regular, had a plot to hang this film on, the results would have been better.

What little plot there is concerns Carrie’s plans to marry Mr. Big (Chris Noth) after he nonchalantly proposes to her. If you’ve watched television or movies at all in the last, oh say, thirty years, you know where this storyline is going. The subplots, if they can be called that, also deal with whether or not Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), the fastidious lawyer, will forgive her hubby’s infidelity after Steve (David Eigenberg) cites Miranda’s demanding work schedule as a reason for his wrongdoing. I guess Steve, or better yet, King, doesn’t see what the big deal is in being a lawyer and a mother. This is a show claiming to be about female empowerment, yet it critiques women who focus on work and family. As one joke makes clear, Miranda is to blame for Steve’s indiscretions because of her unhygienic and sexually unappealing bikini line.

Samantha (Kim Cattrall) has been the town whore since the series debuted. I know, I know, ladies, she is empowered and liberated. Bullshit. She’s nothing more than all the qualities you hate in a man packaged with breasts and a fashionista’s shallowness. Here, Samantha spends the entire film apparently racking up frequent-flyer miles traveling back and forth between L.A., where she works as her boyfriend’s publicist (how liberating!), and New York. Her problem is whether or not she can remain monogamous and resist the temptation to sleep with her sexy neighbor. That’s it. That’s her story. Sensing this may be lacking, King later adds a degrading sub-plot involving Samantha’s gorging on food as a means of coping with sexual frustration. At least when American Psycho used tastelessness to express character is was satirical. This is just embarrassing. As for Charlotte (Kristin Davis), there’s not much to say other than she smiles a lot, which means she’ll be up for a Golden Globe nomination later in the year.

And lastly, something must be said for the introduction of Jennifer Hudson’s Louise, Carrie’s assistant. When a character is this useless it is hard not to automatically assume King wrote the part in order to pander to critics deriding the show’s obvious whiteness. Louise is written as Carrie’s literal and spiritual assistant, to which King dramatizes by having Louise do nothing but setup Carrie’s email account, praise Louis Vuitton handbags and admit to moving to Manhattan to “find love.” A character of no use in an already bloated film would have been forgiven if not for the Hudson’s ghastly acting. She delivers her lines as if they were being fed to her via an earpiece. What a shame.

I know there’s something I am missing when I watch Sex and the City. The women next me where constantly cheering, applauding, and wiping away tears, so clearly I was out of the loop. But it is curious that for a show purporting to illuminate the mind of the opposite sex the biggest laugh would come from a poop joke involving Charlotte and Mexican water. Dumb and Dumber meets “The View”.

Richard X
© Cinephile Magazine, 2008