It's just a matter of coincidence that I've been watching multiple 80s movies lately, although one of the reasons for yesterday's pick of a Wheeler and Woolsey movie was because of the surfeit of more recent movies. But I watched another 80s film recently: The Witches of Eastwick.
The movie begins in Eastwick, the sort of New England small town that you might have seen in a studio era movie as the sort of idyllic place where everybody knows everyone else and there's a lot of civic pride with the students also taking part in that, here in the form of the school band conducted by cellist Jane Spofford (Susan Sarandon) at a speech given on the front lawn of the school given by the principal. It's a boring enough speech that Jane and two of her friends: sculptress Alex Medford (Cher) and newspaper reporter Sukie Ridgemont (Michelle Pfeiffer) are all bored out of their minds. Suddenly, however, a surprise thunderstorm breaks out.
Now, because the title of the movie is The Witches of Eastwick, we can take an educated guess that these women are likely to be witches. However, in the context of the movie, they don't realize it. Nor do they realize that their witching power is amplified by being together; they'll learn these thing over the course of the film. Instead, the three friends get together and talk about their sexual frustrations over their failed marriages, going into fairly explicit detail over the type of man they'd like as Mr. Right. Little do they know that by doing this, they're actually casting a spell that will bring said Mr. Right to Eastwick.
Everybody in town is talking about the mysterious stranger who has bought the mansion on the edge of town, a mansion that has lore in the town's history for its involvement in its own Salem-like witch trial 300 years earlier. They all know the man is charming, even if for some weird reason they can't remember his name. The only person who sees through all of this is Felicia Alden (Veronica Cartwright), the wife of the newspaper editor (and Sukie's boss), Clyde Alden (Richard Jenkins).
That strange man is Daryl Van Horne (Jack Nicholson), who by this age isn't exactly a sex symbol, but is at least the sort of good-enough well-to-do man that a woman desirious of stability would want. But because it was the three witches who were responsible for Daryl's coming to Eastwick, it turns out that he's also a warlock himself, more or less a spawn of the devil. Daryl sets about charming the three witches, while also trying to remove the threat that he sees in Felicia. Will the witches figure out how much of threat Daryl is before it's too late?
The Witches of Eastwick is based on a novel by John Updike, one that has a very interesting premise. For the most part, the movie handles the premise well, at least in terms of the script. The performances are also uniformly strong, notably Nicholson, who was quite good at playing the sort of charming character he has here. Some critics at the time had a problem with the climactic battle of good and evil, suggesting that it was almost cartoonish. I can understand why somebody would have that sort of criticism, although it's not one that I found myself having.
For me, the big problem is that this is another movie with intrusive direction. I get that portraying magical powers is sometimes going to require special effects, and that with special effects not being quite so good 35 years ago the effects might not always look right. But here the problems were more with camera movements and shots that were overdone; two scenes that come to mind are a string of pearls breaking up and the tennis match. This camerawork wasn't as obnoxious as, say, Darkest Hour, but every time it showed up it was jarring.
Still, The Witches of Eastwick is an interesting movie, and one that definitely deserves to be seen.
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