The First Wives Club

Some time back during one of the previous free preview weekends, I had the chance to record the comedy The First Wives Club. I've already got a pair of posts planned for tomorrow, and at any rate I thought The First Wives Club was going to be on tomorrow, so I planned to post about it today. It turns out I'm off by several hours, as the next airing of The First Wives Club will be 7:38 AM Friday (Nov. 4) on HBO Comedy, and several times over the next two weeks on various channels in the HBO family.

The movie starts off with a brief prologue. At Middlebury College, the Class of 1969 is about to graduate. Four young women are best friends: Elise (played in the present day by Goldie Hawn), Annie (Diane Keaton), Brenda (Bette Midler), and Cynthia (Stockard Channing). They vow that they'll be best friends forever, not realizing that in the pre-internet days, best friends like this would almost invariably fall out of touch. With that in mind, we fast-forward to mid-1990s New York.

Cynthia is a divorcée, having been married to a wealthy Wall Street trader (James Naughton). She apparently got one of the Manhattan penthouses in the divorce, as well as alimonty to be able to keep living in the style to which she had become accustomed. But she finds out that her ex-husband is about to remarry, this time to a trophy wife, and for her that's the final straw. She writes a suicide note as well as writing to each of her former Middlebury friends, and throws herself off the balcony of her apartment.

She having been married to an important person in New York, and having offed herself in fairly spectacular fashion, her death unsurprisingly becomes front-page news, and causes her three friends from college to attend the funeral, after which the three go out to luncheon together after the funeral, meeting a second time after they receive the cards Cynthia had written them before her death. And, they find that each of them still has a lot in common with Cynthia apart from not being dead like Cynthia.

Annie is married to an advertising executive, Aaron (Stephen Collins), but he has been way too dominant in their marriage to the point that she sees a therapist. (Or mabye it's from all the neurotic Woody Allen movies she did.) And then she finds that Aaron is having an affair with the therapist. Brenda is already divorced, from discount electronics retalier Morty (Dan Hedaya), and is living in fairly modest circumstances. As for Elise, she became an actress, and even won an Oscar before time caught up to her and she couldn't age gracefully into older women roles. Her producer husband Bill (Victor Garber) starts having an affair with an ingenue actress Phoebe (Elizabeth Berkley), leading them to divorce too.

Once the three women find out they're all more or less in the same boat, they start thinking about revenge. How can they get back at their husbands and live a happy life? Perhaps if they pool their resources, they can start something called the "First Wives Club", and not only get back at their husbands, but use it to bigger and better things for women in general. However, they also learn that the same things that caused them to drift apart in the years after Middlebury are still there, and the inevitable personality clashes threaten to derail the whole plan.

The First Wives Club is a movie with a fun premise, if one that isn't necessarily new, as there have been a lot of revenge comedies over the years. And to be honest, the material here turns out to be surprisingly slight, as there's a fairly slow buildup and not all that much in how the first wives get their revenge. But the three leading actresses really do pull off the material well, combined with some help from the support, and several cameos. I found it interesting that Kathie Lee Gifford would show up, since she was the much younger trophy wife #3 of retired football star-turned color commentator Frank Gifford. On the weak side there are a couple of musical numbers that bring proceedings to a screeching halt. Well, only one does since the second is at the end of the movie segueing into the closing credits.

So The First Wives Club is an uneven movie, but one that hits more than it misses.