The First Wives Club (1996) Reviews

• great entertainment

  theappleorchardeh2006-11-20

  Although many feel that the movie fell short I think they missed the point of the movie. The movie starts showing four very different women, and flashes back 25+ years ago when they were close collage friends. Their lives have taken them in four different directions and their lives are very different from each other. The movie isn't about making fun of men, divorce, fame or fortune. Its about women friends - not casual "how are you, nice to see you again" friends - the kind of friends who know the you way down deep inside, and don't let you get away with anything because they know you too well. These women interact in a way that men will never understand, but that most women will identify with. In the end, this movie is great entertainment. Pure and simple. No great message to deliver - just relax and enjoy it, thats what its there for!

• Silly, fun movie

  jruwaldt2000-12-22

  This is a silly movie with plenty of entertaining comedy. Any male-bashing in it is clearly intended in good fun, even if it's dead serious for the characters. I found absolutely nothing offensive about this film, recognizing it for the light-hearted fun it is. A lot of men ARE scum. This just isn't the sort of comedy where generalizations and stereotypes are dangerous and offensive. In contrast, I was rather frustrated by Waiting to Exhale, because I felt it was too serious in its male-bashing. The women in First Wives Club seemed clever and delightfully devious, whereas the women in Waiting to Exhale seemed to prefer to sit around discussing how evil men are and plotting bits of petty revenge that showed how superior they are, not to mention setting fire to their husbands' property. First Wives Club takes a more constructive and intelligent approach to the problem and does so with much hilarity. I don't see how anyone can be offended by something as fun as this. I also find a comparison to Birth of a Nation to be very stretched, particularly since the attitudes in First Wives Club are not as dangerous, and, as I have reiterated several times, they are not intended to be serious. Overall, I would rate this film at least a seven.

• Instructive - maybe not; hilarious - definitely!

  Geofbob2001-11-20

  Like Nine to Five, First Wives Club purports to be making a statement - albeit in comedy mode - about a serious feminist issue, but like that movie is simply an opportunity to portray women getting back at men who have taken advantage of them - and why not?! While the film may have little practical application to the majority of women who are "traded in" for newer models, but whose men are not as well heeled as the husbands in this film, it does provide them with 100 minutes of escapist entertainment from three great American actresses - OK Bette Midler may not be the best actress in the world but she's certainly hugely entertaining. Midler plays one of three 60s college friends, who meet 25 years later and find that they've each been deserted - her businessman ex-hubby keeps her short of cash while buying skimpy designer dresses for his skimpy girlfriend (Sarah Jessica Parker). The other two in the triumvirate are Diane Keaton as a diffident door-mat, and Goldie Hawn as an alcoholic and facelifted filmstar. But this is one movie where there is no doubt about the characters undergoing an "arc" during its course, and hardly anyone emerges unaltered. Along the way, there are lots of laughs, a few tears, and an unforgettable rendition of You Don't Own Me. Elsewhere on IMDb, some ungenerous souls have used the word hysterical to describe this movie; hysterically funny is nearer the mark.

• When Bad Stories Happen to Good Actresses

  nycritic2005-07-18

  It doesn't matter that the reviews of the book version of THE FIRST WIVES CLUB were generally good. It doesn't take away from the fact that it's nothing more than a thinly disguised bad story with a potentially wicked set-up that has seen better days and which not even the good chemistry of the three main performers can save. On learning of the death of their one-time college friend Cynthia Swann-Griffin (Stockard Channing in an all-too-brief cameo) due to the abandonment from her husband, three recently divorced women, Annie Paradis (Diane Keaton), Elise Eliott (Goldie Hawn), and Brenda Cushman (Bette Midler) come together to get back at their former husbands by essentially taking away their freedom. Sounds familiar? In 1989, Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep starred in SHE DEVIL, a bad (but compared to this trash, a classic) movie adaptation of the novel of the same name in which a middle-class wife, on being dumped by her husband for a successful romance novelist, decides to destroy her home, her family, and take away her husband's freedom by starting her own "club" for women in the same situation as she. Even farther to 1980: 9 TO 5 told a similar story about three co-workers (Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton) who band together to make mincemeat of their male chauvinistic pig of a boss played by Dabney Coleman, and essentially prove to the entire office that woman make work more efficient. And even farther, to 1939, to a classic and the mother of all "desperate housewives": THE WOMEN brilliantly told the acid tale of how society women lose their husbands to social climbers, and while Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) does what no feminist would do -- go back to her unseen Stephen -- it is still a powerful tale of women, their men, and how they survive in a Darwinistic society where bitches eat bitches for lunch while playing bridge at 5 PM. And at the same time gave many of its actresses (all icons, from Joan Crawford to Paulette Goddard to Rosalind Russell to the great Lucille Watson) roles to sink their teeth in, something that has essentially gone South in the Hollywood of today. But not to digress, even though I am talking of the same essential theme, THE FIRST WIVES CLUB should have been a much better movie than it is. All of the elements are there to make its comedy not only dark, but biting, cruel, politically incorrect (contrary to its PC nature), and not tack on the saccharine, cloying mess that pretends to be an ending. At the same time, there has to be something to like about in these three women: Annie comes across as vaguely sympathetic (a more intellectual version of Mary Haines), but her shrillness is so over-the-top and her transformation from klutz to business entrepreneur so unbelievable it's not possible to feel for her. Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn do better with what little material they've been given while still being little more than caricatures. Hawn at least does poke fun at Hollywood's treatment of actresses which may also be at her own "persona" which has (as Elise Eliott says) refused to age, but other than that, there's not much bite in her resolve to do her husband in. Then we have the supporting characters, none which fare any better. What is Bronson Pinchot doing as (yet another) affected character stupidly named "Duarto Feliz?" (Don't writers do their research in writing about characters with Spanish names?) None of the younger women are written as little more as props, though at least Sarah Jessica Parker has a couple of lines that hint of a different version of Carrie Bradshaw. The husbands... well... they're essentially unrepentant jerks, and while in THE WOMEN they remained invisible, there was the idea that in that story they were actual people. That inexplicably, Dan Hedaya's character suddenly does an about-face at the end seems made to satisfy at least a part of the audience who would want to see at least one of the women retain their partner. And what's with Annie having a lesbian daughter if it doesn't tie into anything else in the story? That lesbians hate men and make great allies to jilted women everywhere? I didn't get it, I still don't get it, and it didn't work for me. It just proves that a bad screenplay filled with unsympathetic characters will kill the central idea in a story, but also, that an equally bad direction with odd takes and bad editing will further the damage. Stockard Channing's death scene is so badly filmed it might as well been an afterthought from another movie that somehow found its way here. The sequence when Keaton, Midler, Hawn, and Pinchot intercept Dan Hedaya's apartment is another study in absolute ineptitude in creating comic slapstick, but then again, so is the sequence when Keaton discovers her husband wants to divorce her and in pops Marcia Gay Harden: what a lost opportunity to really make it the best moment on the screen! Didn't anyone do their homework? Does anyone recall the scene in THE WOMEN when Sylvia Fowler finds out her husband is set to marry Miriam Aarons (who is right in front of her) and then rips into her in a memorable cat-fight? That was a scene: this was a travesty. Which most of this movie is, anyway.

• A Completely Winning Comedy

  Isaac58552005-12-12

  THE FIRST WIVES CLUB is a sparkling all-star comedy that hits all the right notes and makes you want to cheer out loud while you're watching. This is the story of three former college girlfriends (Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler) who are reunited after many years due to the suicide of a mutual friend (Stockard Channing) and all learn that they have been dumped by their husbands for younger women. They bond and not only plan revenge on their husbands but take their revenge to another unexpected level that is curiously refreshing for a comedy of this type. Keaton, Hawn, and Midler are marvelous as the women out for their ex-husbands'blood. Stephen Collins, Victor Garber, and Dan Hedaya are all on the mark as the scummy ex-husbands. There are funny bits contributed along the way by Rob Reiner as Hawn's plastic surgeon, Sarah Jessica Parker as Hedaya's mistress, Maggie Smith as a wealthy divorcée, Bronson Pinchot as a faux designer, Eileen Heckart as Keaton's mother, and Marcia Gay Harden as Collins'therapist/mistress. A wonderful script is smartly mounted by director Hugh Wilson with an energetic cast to produce a terrific film comedy which can easily be watched several times and discover new pleasures on each viewing.