Bewitched '05: Worth Another Look? (aka Deal With It, Derwood)

A defence of Nora Ephron's much-derided feature adaptation of the classic fantasy sitcom Bewitched, starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, is frankly something I had never anticipated writing, not least while I was actually watching the thing on its release in 2005. But how time makes fools of us all.

I remember the summer of '05 being rather an underwhelming one for blockbusters. I know Batman Begins had a lot of devotees, but it was not my cup of tea. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy was a crushing disappointment (with hindsight, I've no idea why my expectations were ever so high - if there was ever a thing Hollywood was guaranteed to screw up, it was Douglas Adams), The War of The Worlds had a few technically sound moments, but was overall one of Spielberg's lesser efforts, ditto Burton and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, and I utterly loathed Madagascar. Bewitched had never struck me as all that promising from the outset, and I only wound up seeing it, on release, because I went as part of a group; I'd had my eye on a different picture altogether, but got outvoted, so on my first ever viewing I was a tad resentful that I was having to sit through this total fluff piece because the rest of my party couldn't cope with something more cerebral. It didn't help that, at the time, I was also quite weary of Will Ferrell in general; as a student, I belonged to a cinema club that was overseen by a group of rabid Ferrell cultists (feral Ferrellists, as a friend of mine once dubbed them) who liked to quote Ron Burgundy ad nauseam. Anything with Ferrell was guaranteed to get a screening, no matter how well-received, so of course they snapped Bewitched up the following autumn. And, despite my cool reaction the first time around, I watched it again, because what else was I going to do on a Friday night? Years onward, and I've reached the worrying stage where Bewitched now registers as something cozy and nostalgic to me, seeing as I associate it with those Friday nights from a bygone age when I was a callow undergrad with nothing better to do than to watch movies in a chilly auditorium. (Oh, and incidentally, that "cerebral" film I had wanted to see - it was a little film called Crash, which you might have heard of. Needless to say, it turned out to be an absolute piece of shit, and Bewitched the superior picture in every way. With hindsight, my friends had the right idea all along. As I say, time = fools of us all.)

Bewitched '05 wasn't your mother's Bewitched, a fact that earned it few admirers at the time. Critics were unsparing and audiences indifferent. Those hoping for something in the vein of When Samantha Met Derwood were vexed as to why Ephron had chosen such a bafflingly postmodern approach to the material. Was there not a perfectly fun and charming picture to be mined from a more straightforward treatment of the beloved sitcom? To an extent, I think that Ephron was merely catering to her strengths - the juxtaposition of two parallel narratives, one modern and "real", the other familiar and fictional, puts me in mind of her earlier hit Sleepless In Seattle (1993) and its affectionately parasitic relationship with An Affair To Remember (1957). No doubt she was hoping to create a similar dynamic here, but with an overtly outlandish, reality-blurring vibe in the vein of Spike Jonze's then-recent Adaptation. (2002). It didn't pay off, but I can give Ephron props for at least trying to think outside the box and do something a little unexpected in lieu of a routine remake. It's easy to question why after the fact, when you're stuck with an unsuccessful product, but there are a high number of popular and acclaimed risk-taking pictures (Adaptation. included) that feel as though they could so easily have gone the other way. Enough of the right ingredients were certainly in place for Bewitched to have been a smashing success; in its case, the stars just didn't align, but I can buy that it looked like a great idea on paper.

I should admit upfront that I am hopelessly unqualified to comment on how successful the film is in capturing the essence of the original sitcom, which debuted in 1964 and ran for eight seasons, none of which I have had the pleasure of viewing first-hand. Growing up, it was just not something on my radar, and I think Ephron's film may have even been my formal introduction to the very existence of the series (there is a Simpsons opening that has Bart writing "Bewitched does not promote Satanism" on the chalkboard, but when I was a kid the only "Bewitched" I knew was the Irish girl band B*Witched, and I probably assumed he was referencing that). I do, however, get the gist of what it was about - a suburban housewife, played by Elizabeth Montgomery, who was secretly a witch, and whose marriage to a mortal milksop (played by Dick York for the first five seasons, and Dick Sargent for the remainder) was a subject of serious contention among her magical family, who were constantly interfering in their day to day lives. Plans for a feature Bewitched adaptation had been drawn up as early as the 1990s, when actor/director Ted Bessell bought the rights and began developing ideas with the help of one-time Babysitter Bandit Penny Marshall. The project was shelved following Bessell's death in 1996, but it's easy to see how the more conventional adaptation then being shepherded would have fit right in with the cinematic climate of the 90s, when Hollywood was going through a full-blown love affair with the 1960s television the current crop of producers had presumably grown up watching (among others, there were feature film remakes of Dennis the Menace, The Brady Bunch, The Flintstones, My Favorite Martian and Flipper). By the time Bewitched came to fruition in the mid-00s, the cycle had largely passed, and the film had adjusted its nostalgic specs accordingly, applying greater distance from the source by going all meta and retooling itself as a modern romantic comedy set against the making of a 21st century take on Bewitched. What was in right now was Will Ferrell and his personal brand of manic improv humor, and that's something the 2005 picture was going to amp up for all it was worth. I actually don't feel that my lack of familiarity with the source puts me at too big a disadvantage, as overall the finished product seems less interested in being a heartfelt love letter to a beloved sitcom than in trading on something familiar from popular culture while regarding it with a tongue-in-cheek remoteness suggesting new milliennium hip; the various shout-outs and references to the original sitcom all appear to have quotation marks around them. Take, for example, the left of field appearance in the climax of a character named Uncle Arthur; the film operates on the assumption that I'll know who the character is, which I don't (beyond what's already self-explanatory)...but I do get that I'm watching Steve Carell doing a Paul Lynde impersonation, and that feels like it might very well be the joke in itself.

Kidman plays Isabel Bigelow, an idealistic witch whose pursuit of a fresh start has led her to Los Angeles, where she intends to pass herself off as a mortal and live the nondescript life of which she's so enamoured - much to the disapproval of her warlock father Nigel (Michael Caine), who insists that she'll never be able to survive out there without falling back on her magical abilities (to be fair, it does make life so much more convenient when you can adjust reality with a simple snap of your fingers). Meanwhile, Ferrell plays Jack Wyatt, a self-obsessed actor dangerously close to hitting rock bottom, although it wouldn't do for a man of his ego to admit it. His previous film, Last Year In Kathmandu, was such a career-derailing disaster that it managed to shift a grand total of zero DVD copies, and his personal life isn't much rosier, with his wife Sheila (Katie Finneran) having separated from him under humiliating circumstances. His only recourse is to turn to television, and to accept the role of Darrin in an upcoming reboot of the 1960s sitcom Bewitched. Jack, however, has this one big reservation about the project: Samantha, and not Darrin, was the star of the original series, and that's something he's determined to change in this particular go-around. He asserts enough creative control over the series to stipulate that an unknown actress be cast in the role of Samantha, with the intention of minimising her input and keeping himself firmly at the centre (not having seen the original series, I can't say for certain, but I'm going to assume there's something inherently absurd in the very idea of trying to make it all about the non-magical Derwood). Naturally, he crosses paths with Isabel and, noting the uncanny resemblance between her nose and that of the original Samantha, coaxes her into joining the project, unaware that he's tangling with an actual witch. Isabel's idealism can only blind her to Jack's egotistical machinations for so long, however, at which point she puts aside her aspirations for a magic-free lifestyle and sets her sights on getting even with Jack. And you know how this game goes. First the resentment and misunderstandings, then the inevitable magnetism.

The first really obvious problem Bewitched has riding against it is its flimsy yet incongruously fussy plotting, which never comes together to create a coherent and satisfying narrative. Instead, we get lots of episodic, miniature conflicts that better resemble the experiencing of watching multiple installments of a half-hour TV series stitched together to create a single unconvincing feature. When Isabel gets wise to Jack's nefarious ploy to shut her out of the spotlight, she first has some fun using her powers to manipulate his on set behaviour and sabotage several scenes to show off her own comedic chops. Then she's persuaded to cast a hex on Jack that, as an unintended consequence, causes him to fall head over heels in love with her; to her surprise, Isabel discovers that she could make it work with this brainwashed version of Jack, but her reservations on the ethics of a magic-induced romance eventually get the better of her and cause her to (quite literally) reverse the entire hex narrative arc. In its place, Isabel chews Jack out for his self-absorption and threatens to quit the series, but Jack, impressed by this display of moxie, agrees that she be given a fuller role and falls in love with her for real. Jack and Isabel have thus resolved all of their major differences with the movie barely past the hour mark, leaving the third act a bit strapped for momentum. It has Jack's wife show up out of the blue, apparently intent on rekindling their marriage now that his career might be picking up, but she doesn't stay long enough for anything to come of this (besides one of the script's better physical gags). Finally, it hangs its climactic action on the crisis of confidence Isabel is suddenly feeling regarding keeping her real identity as a witch hidden from Jack, and Jack's reluctance to accept this when the bombshell is eventually dropped on him. There's also a subplot involving Nigel's pursuit of one of Isabel's co-stars, Iris, played by Shirley MacLaine, and his beginning to suspect that she too might be a witch, a narrative thread that's only half-resolved. Many of the individual jokes are decent enough (I enjoy an animal wrangler's desperate attempts to get a non-compliant dog to run in a specified direction) but there's no cohesive effect.

Bewitched is a glorious mess from start to finish, but more harmful than the chaotic story structure would be the total lack of chemistry between Kidman and Ferrell, which keeps it from succeeding on its own terms as a sweet romantic comedy, and was egregious enough to earn the film a Golden Raspberry Award for the year's worst screen couple. I can't really argue with the Razzies on this one - the two are like ketchup on apple pie. Largely, it's a reflection of the project's skewed priorities. The grand irony that appears to be lost on the film is that the central problem keeping the lead characters occupied (at least for the first hour or so) is mirrored in the interplay between the two leads - which is to say that there's too much emphasis on making this another Will Ferrell comedy vehicle when Kidman should frankly be the star. Ferrell may have been the film's greatest asset from a marketing standpoint in 2005, but he's also its biggest problem. I wouldn't go so as to claim that Ferrell single-handedly derails Bewitched, but I think he is, in no small way, responsible for the tonal dissonance that pervades the picture and prevents it from ever settling down and figuring out what it's about and to whom it's supposed to appeal. Ferrell can be a joy to watch when he's given the right material (case in point, we all know how much of a hoot he is in Elf). Here, I feel he was misdirected, and possibly even miscast altogether. In depicting Jack as the kind of cartoonishly buffoonish man-child we can delight in rooting against, he's perfectly within his element, but he has more trouble when it comes to depicting Jack as the kind of inwardly sensitive romantic lead we can comfortably see our heroine ending up with. Ferrell approaches the role from an entirely irreverent angle that always seems to be wanting to take the picture in a more arch, Frat Pack-friendly direction - something closer in spirit to his recent hit Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy - which can both suit and disturb the story depending on what stage of its trajectory we're at. During the portion of the film where Jack is hexed into falling in love with Isabel, he does an enjoyable parody of a man twitterpated out of his wits. When he later becomes romantically involved with Isabel for real, their non-existent chemistry still feels as though it's in the exact same quotation marks. Which might have been less of an issue in a version of the story that enabled all of the players to be on the same page, but that's not the case here. Kidman approaches the role of Isabel with a sweet sincerity that feels indicative of the project's origins as a more reverent and faithful translation of the series. She is, in a word, charming - but the film underestimates Kidman's charm, instead favouring Ferrell's aggressively domineering comedy style and allowing the warmth and likeability she brings to be completely suffocated. The two of them barely belong in the same feature, let alone the same romantic pairing.

At the heart of Bewitched is the disarming fantasy of a naive witch trying to give up on magic and figure out how to survive in the real world. Bewitched itself seems to forget about this for despairingly long stretches, so hung up is the film on the delusion that this is Jack's story and that his neurotic outbursts are the main event. But that story thread is nevertheless there, and it's why I've come around to kind of sort of liking Bewitched, in spite of Bewitched. Kidman is just too darn likeable for me to write the whole picture off as a failure. But I find that a lot of the film's eccentricities and downright baffling decisions have also grown on me over the years - not least, the curious wrap-up where Isabel decides that the key to thriving in the real world is to duck out of it altogether. At the end, she and Jack find mutual refuge from their self-doubts by assuming the identities of the fictional characters they've been playing. Despite Ephron's insistence that she had no interest in creating a film that functioned as a prequel to the series (as was apparently the approach of everybody else who had worked on the project before her), the final scene makes it clear that she has done exactly that - the film ends precisely where the sitcom scenario would be expected to pick up, with Isabel and Jack marrying and moving into a house resembling the one inhabited by their on-screen counterparts, before spooking Mrs Kravitz across the road by magicking up a tree in their front yard. I surely can't be the only one unable to shake the feeling that they've ditched their own reality by retreating into a fictional world in the manner of Howard Duff's character from the classic Twilight Zone episode "A World of Difference"? The most comparable film I can think of would be Karel Reisz's 1981 adaptation of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, in which Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons play Anna and Mike, the lead actors in an in-universe adaptation of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, sequences from which are interspersed with episodes from the actors' backstage affair (the film was scripted by Harold Pinter, who did love his stories about role-playing lovers). Fowles' book was itself very meta and regularly broke the fourth wall, so for Reisz's film the whole "making of" angle was a logical means of incorporating an equivalent kind of interplay more appropriate to the world of cinema. Fowles' book also concludes with an invitation to the reader to choose between two possible endings, one hopeful, the other bitterly unhappy, with the warning that each is ultimately as plausible as the other; Pinter's strategy of adapting the story into two parallel narratives enables the film to likewise show both endings, more-or-less - Hollywood naturally favours the more optimistic ending, while the "real" world offers no such clemency. In the closing sequence, Mike makes his last ditch plea to Anna by addressing her by her character's name, "Sarah", raising questions as to whom he has really fallen for - the real woman, or an abstract ideal embodied by a fictional character. Something very similar occurs at the end of Bewitched, when Jack professes love to Isabel, but mistakenly (or not?) calls her "Samantha". Unlike Streep in the aforementioned film, Isabel reciprocates by calling him "Darrin", granting us the happy ending that was beyond Anna and Mike, but prompting similar questions regarding their final relationship with reality.

Isabel's climactic dilemma comes from being caught between two worlds and feeling that she belongs in neither; it should come as no surprise that both worlds, "real" and magic, are entrenched in fantasy. At the start of the film, when discussing her magical prowess and her desire to step away from it, Isabel uses language analogous to overcoming a drinking habit; there's a lot of talk of "falling off the wagon" whenever the temptation to cast a spell gets the better of her. An equally apt comparison, given Nigel's repeated interjections, would be family endowment, with Isabel wishing to be self-sufficient and to forge her own independent path in life without having to fall back on the resources she's lucked into by birth - her magical powers are figurative credit cards (in one sight gag, they take the form of a literal credit card, or rather tarot card) granting her access to seemingly limitless funds, and giving her a head start on living out the consumerist fantasies that characterise aspirations in the real world. Isabel's first action, on arriving in Los Angeles, is to secure a swanky abode with the use of magic (albeit one that's located just down the street from a Denny's, so there's always a catch), where she is swiftly initiated into the joys of lawn sprinklers, microwaved popcorn and cable television. One needn't squint too hard to see a parallel between the instant gratification she criticises among the inhabitants of the magical realm and the real world banalities for which she feels such deep fascination; in her new terrain, she is surrounded by technological luxuries in which everything is similarly accomplished at the touch of a button. More crucially, she acquires, with ease so ludicrous it could only be magic, the kind of bourgeois paradise the average denizen would struggle to attain. Her life in the real world is a materialist sham, birthed from a culture that thrives on insatiable consumption (this omnipresent consumerism is further underscored in a sequence where Isabel is out shopping and Nigel ambushes her by transmuting his form into a variety of brand logos), one that Isabel ultimately deems to be no more nourishing than the falsehoods she was accustomed to swallowing among her fellow enchanters. Toward the end of the film, she asks Nigel where home is, actual is advised "Wherever you've been the happiest." Isabel responds by abandoning her brick and mortar house and flying out to the studio set where she has played the role of Samantha; it is in her staged and scripted life as Samantha that she has found her greatest fulfilment, and it is here that she wishes to remain, an epiphany fortified by Jack's proposition that Samantha's (fictional) existence constitutes an ideal middle path between the mortal and magical realms, and that Isabel might live by following her example. He reasons that Samantha lived happily ever after, before admitting that, "Of course, there's no way to tell because she went off the air..." The suggestion that Samantha's narrative ultimately ended in irresolution introduces an element of disturbance into his proposed nostalgic anchor. After all, the appeal of nostalgia lies in knowing exactly what you are getting, and in replicating the spirit (or an approximation of) of a bygone era that seems, with hindsight, like a simpler time, primarily because it appears so safely removed from the uncertainties of the present. Jack's words imply that Samantha vanished from the airwaves due to a disturbance in the timeline, and are an invitation to Isabel to remedy that by herself becoming Samantha - that fantastical ideal that exists only in televisual (or, in this case, cinematic) fiction - and validating the survival of her breezy sitcom world, not simply for her own benefit, but for a here and now that yearns for the oldfangled reassurances she brings. The discussion around Isabel's wanting to occupy the mortal world whilst embracing her magical heritage might suggest that a balance is desirable between reality and fantasy, yet the closing sequence appears to wholly privilege the latter - it shows a convergence between the two narratives, with Samantha restored to her rightful place, opposite the Kravitzes, and the present attaining its final redemption by disappearing into its past.

Like everything else, Bewitched has a mostly ambivalent attitude toward nostalgia and implications thereof, tending to vacillate between backhanded mockery and genuine reverence in its representation of its sitcom mother. This ambivalence is best epitomised in a sequence where Isabel discusses her new acting gig with her friend Maria, played by Kristin Chenowith (Chenowith's casting is itself something of an in-joke, as she played another of popular culture's iconic witches, Glinda The Good Witch, in the Broadway musical Wicked), who gushes about how much she loved the original show, only to let it slip that she's actually confused it with I Dream of Jeannie, a rival fantasy sitcom from the same era - which, strangely, doesn't hinder her ability to give Isabel a passionate run-through all the beats of the Bewitched title sequence. In another scene, Jack monologues about how much he liked the character of Uncle Arthur and a running gag involving a cracked mirror; it's the kind of thing I'm sure is very fun to watch first-hand, but there's an inevitable tedium in hearing somebody else describe it back to you, and it's hard to say just how knowing this is on the film's part (we later see Jack laughing hysterically at a Bewitched re-run, but his reaction is so exaggerated that it's similarly unclear if we're supposed to be nodding along with his rampant enthusiasm or sniffing at his absurdity as a human being). Meanwhile, the in-universe charge that the Bewitched revival is "a crass attempt by the network to market nostalgia, rather than take a risk on new ideas" comes off as the obligatory sprinkling of pseudo self-deprecation any truly hip reconstruction needs to demonstrate that it's a good sport, with Jack's response ("This isn't the old Bewitched, it's been refocussed") enabling the film to go explicitly on the defensive. By the final sequence, the film seems to have settled on an predominantly celebratory perspective on nostalgia, with Isabel and Jack finding security in taking up permanent residence inside a world reassembled wholesale from pop cultural memory. The reverence with which the characters regard the original Bewitched, however overblown, is likewise vindicated, with the film appearing to make the case for the value of escapist fantasy. At the beginning of the film, Isabel complains to Nigel that her inability to live as she pleases is akin to being "pressed against a glass window...it's right there on the other side. I can see it but I can't feel it, I can't touch it." While ostensibly alluding to the reality in which she so yearns to participate, what she more deftly describes is the plight of the television viewer looking to be absorbed into an on-screen fantasy world for half an hour or so - something Isabel successfully achieves at the end of the film when she makes the fictional world of the original sitcom her literal reality. It does mean that we close with the implication that Isabel failed in her mission to live in the real world. But then, Bewitched supposes, who does want to live in the real world? Isabel finds fulfilment in making gentle fantasy re-accessible to mortals who'd otherwise have only the consumerist constants of Denny's restaurants, Coffee Beans and the Jolly Green Giant to distract them from the terrors of uncertainty (a fantasy that's as market-tested a product as any other, but sometimes magic happens in between the cracks).

Naturally, Isabel feels at home in assuming the role of Samantha because she is Samantha, more-or-less. The uncanny symmetry between Isabel's life and that of her fictional counterpart are evoked repeatedly - she has the same abilities, and a meddling magical family, including an Aunt Clara and (possibly) an Uncle Arthur - reinforcing our intuitive understanding that she has always been the displaced protagonist of a fantasy sitcom and never known it. She is a fantasy figure who, much like Pinnochio, wishes to become real, but finds that reality is neither desirable nor desired of her. She exudes an airy, ethereal romanticism, one that is blatantly not of the Los Angeles she arrives in, and which, the instant she touches down, is just waiting to be snapped up and utilised by a world that has survived more than three decades with Bewitched regulated to the re-run heap, but is all the rosier for its restoration. The problem Jack poses, regarding what became of the "original" Samantha, might well be echoed in an otherwise unresolved loose end, subtler than that involving Nigel and Iris, that was, in all likelihood, leftover from an earlier draft of the story, and that has to do with the whereabouts of Isabel's mother. It is established during her opening conversation with Nigel that Isabel's parents are separated, and when Nigel asks her what her mother makes of her newfound aspirations, Isabel responds, "She's disappeared again." It looks as though they're setting up for Isabel's mother to come up again later as a plot point, or at the very least a brick joke, but this doesn't happen. She is alluded to when Isabel informs Jack that when anyone in her family gets angry, "we usually just disappear". Otherwise, the only other really explicit reference to Isabel's absent parent is her mentioning that her mother fixed the world series. So what gives? I remember anticipating that Iris might turn out to be Isabel's mother, which would tie in both with her playing Endora in the in-universe show and the gradual revelation that she too is a witch, although presumably having heavily modified her appearance, given that neither Isabel or Nigel seem to recognise her. But no. Iris herself, or at least her magical abilities, turn out to be something of a non-sequitur - nothing much comes of it other than a couple of moments where she cockblocks Nigel at a party and Uncle Arthur randomly disclosing that she's a witch to Jack. (I find it odd, actually, that there is this other witch wandering around in the backdrop, one who's blatantly already figured out how to live among mortals, and she plays no part whatsoever in the story's resolution - again, earlier draft?) Once we've ruled out Iris, my next best guess would be that Isabel's mother is the original Samantha...although perhaps not literally, and more in the sense that there's a thematic parallel to be drawn between the unexplained absence of Isabel's mother and Samantha's having gone off the air. In both cases, they upped and left, and it falls upon the next generation of benevolent witch looking to hide out in the real world to take up the mantle and demonstrate that Samantha's world is still just as sunny and spotless three decades on. The absence of Isabel's mother leaves the space vacant for Samantha to become her metaphorical mother, a connection aacentuated in the guidance Isabel seeks from Samantha throughout the film.

Alternatively, I am just as happy to entertain the possibility that Uncle Arthur may be Isabel's mother incognito.