The First Wives Club (1996)

It's hard to talk about movies that you end up just sort of watching to kill some time, but this one is a favourite of a close friend so it felt like something I really needed to get to. It's a pretty great exercise in watching pre-"political correctness gone mad" world (if I ever use that phrase in earnest, it's an invasion of the body snatchers situation) movies because you don't have to constant excuse it - "It was a different time", "It was okay to say that then". The First Wives Club stands pretty strong in 2017 as a story of the ins and outs of female bonding and empowerment and finding balance. It's not without flaw, but I didn't feel grimy watching it in the way I do when I watch a lot of 90s movies casually fling around slurs.

The cast of the movie is naturally its biggest drawcard: even the minor rolls are recognisable faces, with the whole plot kicking off as Stockard Channing - the erstwhile Rizzo - commits suicide, to the shock of the close friends from college that have long lost touch. Those friends are, of course, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler, and they're over the top and wonderful. They come together to take down the ex-husbands who left them for younger women and generally treated them like shit. It's not a new story, but it doesn't have to be. The performances are over the top and full of ridiculousness and good, good fun. Maggie Smith is there, Sarah Jessica Parker in the only performance of hers I've enjoyed bar Hocus Pocus, a lucid dream cameo by Ivana Trump that feels all the more absurd in this day and age...JK Simmons is in there and I forgot about it until scrolling through IMDB right now. This movie is so wild on the cast front that I totally forgot that I wanted to mention the tiny JK Simmons bit.

Being the person that I am, I searched for things to latch on to. It's about high society women in New York, so I was expecting the jokes about Bar Mitzvahs. After all, Bette Midler is in it. I wasn't expecting to have such an excellent, casually open lesbian daughter character? That really prompted my emotional investment in the movie. She didn't die, she didn't have a tragic plotline, and she got to rip her awful father's life to shreds. I'm on board. There's a scene in a gay bar that's remarkably even-keeled, with only few notes that could be read in a negative fashion, but overall it had a really positive impact on the movie and on how I felt watching the movie. Basically, more lesbians.

And more good musical numbers. You can tell they had some fun with this, and it was fun to watch as a result.

There were plot points that felt inevitable, and parts of the story that did feel severely out of balance. Certain bits would drag on, conflict would very suddenly rise, and then be almost immediately resolved. Characters with long running issues would smooth them over instantaneously for the sake of plot progression. The set up of the movie took an unnecessarily long time to establish things that often felt like they could easily be inferred. I can also imagine that a lot of people read this movie as excessively mean? It feels almost 80s, shoulder pads, power suit, boss the board room and in the bedroom in terms of vibes. It definitely feels very dated, watching it now. 

It's dated, but dated in ways that feel pleasingly nostalgic rather than numbing and upsetting. Somehow it feels more dated than a lot of other movies that came out in the mid 90s, presumably because of its refreshing focus on older female protagonists rather than the hot twenty somethings of the time. There are a lot of things wrong with this movie, but I can imagine this would be a super fun movie for a lot of occasions, and it definitely has rewatch value. It's also a fascinating look into ideas of the time and of the text, and how they cycle round: imagining some of the bitter internet responses to a movie like this if released today? Yikes. 

Rating: 8/10