Bewitched English Movie

Aug 18, 2005 By Subhash K. Jha

It's always a pleasure to watch Nicole Kidman scale new heights, especially in the satirical slant. In "Bewitched", her appearance slopes off to such an extent that that you end up watching Kidman kidding around as a suburban woman who just happens to be a witch who wants to go straight.

But before Isabel can really reform from broomsticks to suburban domestication, she is selected to play Samantha, the famous nose-wriggling witch in the TV series "Bewitched".

Now Kidman must play a woman pretending to be a witch in a TV serial when everyone thinks she isn't, when as a matter of fact she is.

Confusing? You bet! And totally inured to in-house jokes! As it swings into a satirically subversive mode, the film demands viewers' first-hand familiarity with the old TV serial and its kooky characters -- who are all part of the American pop-culture sensibility, though not necessarily integral to our understanding of TV entertainment and suburban mores.

Director Nora Ephron, generally so good with female actors (remember Meg Ryan in "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail"?), is wonderfully adept at bringing out the pug-nosed impishness of Nicole Kidman.

She also has wonderful support from two veterans Michael Caine, who plays her wry father, and Shirley MacLaine who's surprisingly lacklustre as an actress playing Kidman's witch-confidante in the TV serial.

Director Nora Ephron aims for a cute and shallow complexity within the given parameters of a romantic comedy. You sometimes find her narrative getting over-cute especially in the way the relationship grows between the feisty witch and her serial's producer (Will Ferrell).

The lightness of the material burdens the narrative with a sense of nagging inconsequentiality.

"Bewitched" is the kind of blues chaser that revels in being goofy and wonky. The poker-faced cast furnishes the feisty farce with a sense of blithe magic. But finally, the material is bogged down by too many inward-drawn allusions to characters, situations and events that aren't intelligible to those who aren't avid watchers of the original TV series.

For fans of Kidman, the film is a giggling, glaring foil to her last release "The Interpreter", where she was mysterious and politically incorrect in literal ways. In "Bewitched" she's some more of the same... though in unexpected, if not entirely as endearing as expected, ways.