Title: THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK

Date: 6/15/1995; Publication: Magill's Survey of Cinema;

Magill's Survey of Cinema

06-15-1995

THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK

Abstract:
George Miller's film begins with the general design of John Updike's satiric novel about women frustrated by middle age and unworthy men and lovers, which wickedly suggests that any intelligent and sensitive woman may have the power and potential of becoming a witch. Michael Cristofer's screenplay alters the focus, however, so that the film becomes mainly a Jack Nicholson vehicle. In the novel, the three witches are the central characters. They conjure up the devil (Daryl Van Horne, played by Nicholson), who seduces them and then married a younger woman who does not appear in the film. The witches send the devil back to Hell and are left together at his estate to rear the children he has fathered by them. The film works broadly for comedy, unlike the novel, which is far more subtle and satiric.


Summary:
John Updike is a prestigious writer, and Hollywood is always ready to exploit prestige, even if not commonly prone to respect it. As often happens, the design of Updike's novel, THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1984), was drastically modified to turn the story into a star vehicle for Jack Nicholson, who plays the Devil incarnate, Daryl Van Horne; Van Horne is not, however, the central character of Updike's novel. In Updike's original work, the Devil is a dupe and no match for the three clever women who dominate the narrative. As Pauline Kael remarked in THE NEW YORKER, about Michael Cristofer's ``rickety script,'' the film is little more than ``a farce that resembles its source.''

Understandably, then, Updike's readers were bound to be bothered and bewildered (though perhaps bewitched) by the film version directed by Australian George Miller in 1986, released in June of 1987, and only loosely based upon the novel. The film is little more than a cartoon reduction of the original story about three divorcees who discover that they have supernatural powers, which they use, sometimes spitefully, to terrorize people they dislike in the Rhode Island community where they live. Conventional notions of witchcraft are amusingly updated to the twentieth century.

The witches are led by the artist-earthmother Alexandra, who at thirty-eight, is the eldest of the three. She makes curious female figurines called ``bubbies,'' sculpted with distinctive anatomical enlargements. Jane, who plays the cello, is the most malicious of the three. Sukie, the youngest, is a writer, hacking away as a journalist for a local paper, the Eastwick WORD. All three have artistic temperaments, and in the novel, they know from the beginning that they have supernatural powers. The film reduces their bitchiness as well as their witchiness. It also diminishes their spirit.

Updike wickedly suggests that the power of witchcraft exists in all intelligent, independent, artistic women and that such power can be liberated by female frustration and contempt for men. The local men, whom they use for their carnal pleasures, are relatively stupid and defenseless against their charms. After the witches have worked terrible hexes on their local adversaries, other women in town start to hex them. The film ignores their nastier tendencies, making the women rather ordinary; it opts instead for a bland kind of bewitching comedy where they are concerned. Updike's comedy, often bordering on satire, is far more sophisticated than that of the film.

Updike's plot turns on the appearance of a wealthy, mysterious inventor who comes to town to purchase a local mansion, presumably summoned by the witches, testing their powers. His name is Daryl Van Horne and he seems to be the Devil. The film makes no mistake about his demoniac identity, taking the story one step beyond the reality that Updike meticulously creates, flattening it out and making it obvious. In both versions, the witches seem to have conjured him, and in both he takes possession of the three sexually. In the novel, however, he finally marries a young woman named Jenny, who is then hexed to death by the three very jealous witches.

The cinematic version omits the character of Jenny, consciously undercutting the malevolence of the three female leads, Cher as Alexandra, Susan Sarandon as Jane, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Sukie. Miller, best known for his Mad Max series, told an interviewer that he took on the project without having read the novel. If it is true that he had only read the screenplay and then went on to make modifications on its design, it is hardly surprising that the film wanders so far from its source.

The most major transformation, no doubt, concerns the Van Horne character, which is redesigned as yet another Nicholson loony, making the film look like an unnatural mating of THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK and THE SHINING (1980). Updike's often-elegant and wickedly amusing novel is not exactly improved by a transformation that turns it into a Stephen King-styled Gothic tale about the Devil.

Nevertheless, it is often amusing to watch Nicholson overact and draw new business out of his evil bag of tricks. That wicked flamboyance surely justified whatever extravagance might have been budgeted for his salary. Nicholson's seduction scenes, first with Cher and later with Sarandon, are so outrageous that they are fascinating to watch.

The film builds to a spectacular conclusion, moreover, as the novel does not, as the three witches focus their powers to hex Van Horne out of their lives after he has attempted to punish them for turning their backs on him. The film's finale looks like something out of GHOSTBUSTERS (1984), only slightly more serious. Superior special effects create a ghastly spectacle that is all flash and trash.

In the novel, Van Horne forms an apparently homosexual attachment with Jenny's brother after she dies, and the two of them simply go away together. There is no big finale and no excuse for special effects. In the film, all three witches become pregnant and give birth to sons after they have sent Van Horne back to where he belongs. They continue to live in harmony together at his Eastwick estate and thwart his attempts to communicate with his offspring from the ``other side.'' This conclusion, though flashy and good for a final laugh, has nothing to do with Updike, who almost keeps his narrative within the bounds of ordinary reality.

Clearly, the film was not made for the readers of John Updike but as an excuse for Nicholson to flaunt his extravagant tricks, including a replaying of his mad scene in THE SHINING, played here in a village street in the light of day. The film explodes with his energy, enhanced by special effects, while the witches merely provide entertaining support. Van Horne, a character of some mystery and magnitude in Updike's original, is simplified as a cartoon misogynist and a ``horny little devil,'' made idiotic by his own words.

One discerns a potential problem of focus in Updike's novel. This problem is solved in the film rather crudely by compressing and reinventing the action and by decimating the characters. Cristofer's screenplay distances the witches that Updike so carefully individualized. It deprives the viewer of an adequate context, as when the witches victimize an obnoxious, self-righteous neighbor by having her spit up the sweepings from their kitchen floors. In the novel, their motive is sexual and spiteful. The film version attempts to simplify and improve this sequence by having Felicia (Veronica Cartwright) vomiting cherry pits (in church, no less), intercut with Nicholson feeding the witches cherries as they skinny-dip in his pool. The mischief here is inspired by Nicholson, not by the witches, and the film fails to make clear exactly what may be happening.

Moreover, in the novel Van Horne is not the only man in the witches' lives, just as they are not the only women in his, though he is, to be sure, the most exciting. Updike's witches are not merely sexually repressed singles, just waiting for a sexy devil to detonate them. Regardless of Nicholson's flamboyant lechery (which is clearly played for laughs), the film is relatively chaste when compared to the rampant adultery that dominates the novel. Cher's Alexandra, the dominant character in the novel, is easily eclipsed in the film by Sarandon's Jane, who turns into a ravishing sexpot after Nicholson has fiddled with her.

Updike did not bother to see this motion picture, but after friends had told him that the filmed treatment only slightly resembled his text, he wrote a piece for THE NEW YORK TIMES entitled ``Seen the Movie? Read the Book!'' Updike took the commonsensical position that novelists who sell the rights to their work to Hollywood thereafter lose control over the alterations that usually follow.

He took solace in the fact, however, that ``the text is always there, for the ideal reader to stumble upon, to enter, to reanimate,...readily recoverable and potentially as alive as on the day it was first scribbled.'' Books will be sold, and filmmakers ``owe nothing to the authors of books they adapt except the money they have agreed to pay them.'' Regardless, books are eternal, and the text will survive for those curious enough to seek out the author's original intention, and his irony, elegance, and wit. The worst Hollywood can do is to create mistaken impressions about a book's merits. The best Hollywood can do is to send intelligent viewers scurrying to their local booksellers.

Evaluated purely as a film, however, THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK is far better than the usual Hollywood demoniac horror vehicle: it is made visually interesting by Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography and is sometimes distractingly amusing because of director Miller's sinister comic approach. The major drawing card is Nicholson, at his flamboyant best, who seems to be overcompensating for his lackluster performance in his last motion picture, HEARTBURN (1986). This film, in short, has plenty to offer a popular audience, though it has little to do with Updike, whose text survives, beyond commercialization, for serious readers.


Country of Origin: USA

Release Date: 1987

Production Line:
Neil Canton, Peter Guber, and Jon Peters; released by Warner Bros.

Director: George Miller

Cinematographer: Vilmos Zsigmond

File Editor: Richard Francis-Bruce and Hubert C. De La Bouollerie

Additional Credits:
ART DIRECTION - Polly Platt
SPECIAL EFFECTS - Industrial Light and Magic
MAKEUP - Rob Bottin
MUSIC - John Williams

MPAA Rating: R

Run Time: 122 minutes

Cast:
Daryl Van Horne - Jack Nicholson
Alexandra Medford - Cher
Jane Spofford - Susan Sarandon
Sukie Ridgemont - Michelle Pfeiffer
Felicia Alden - Veronica Cartwright
Clyde Alden - Richard Jenkins
Walter Neff - Keith Joakum
Fidel - Carel Struycker

Review Sources:
Commonweal. CXIV, July 17, 1987, p.421
Fantasy and Science Fiction. LXXIII, October, 1987, p.74
Films in Review. XXXVIII, October, 1987, p.490
Literature/Film Quarterly. XV, number 3, p.151
Los Angeles Times. June 12, 1987, VI, p.1
The New York Times. June 12, 1987, p. C3
The New Yorker. LXIII, June 29, 1987, p.72
Newsweek. CIX, June 15, 1987, p.71
Time. CXXIX, June 22, 1987, p.76
The Washington Post. June 12, 1987, p. D1

Named persons in Production Credits:
Neil Canton
Peter Guber
Jon Peters

Studios named in Production Credits:
Warner Bros.

Screenplay (Author):
Michael Cristofer
John Updike

Color

Video Available.
Genre:
Comedy, Science Fiction/Fantasy

Award Citations:
Academy Awards - Nomination - Music (Original Score) - John Williams
Academy Awards - Nomination - Sound - Wayne Artman
Academy Awards - Nomination - Sound - Tom Beckert
Academy Awards - Nomination - Sound - Tom Dahl
Academy Awards - Nomination - Sound - Art Rochester
New York Film Critics - Winner - Best Actor - Jack Nicholson
British Academy Awards - Winner - Special Visual Effects - Michael Owens

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