Review: Sick of Sex

Again, girlish columnist and New York bon vivant Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) has been wounded by her great love Big, and again her satin-teddy sleepover compadres have rushed in to fix a smile on that long face.

 

“Will I ever laugh again?” Carrie, seemingly determined to wallow eternally, sighs amid the ignorant tourist opulence of a five-star Mexican resort.

 

“Yes,” comes the answer.

 

“When?” she whines.

 

“When something is really, really funny,” she is assured.

 

Expectedly, Carrie and her luckless princess coterie – knife-edged, harried careerist mom Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), bright-eyed, preternaturally ditzy mom Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and perpetually horny nouveau-Mae West Samantha (Kim Cattrall) – have a rip-snorting yuk over soiled track pants about five minutes later. Me? I’m still waiting…

 

…and waiting. At an excruciating run time of 148 vacuous minutes, Sex and the City: The Movie is a spectacular conflation of capital-I Issues, a depressing marker of how far aspirations have fallen in 10 short years. Back in 1998, when Darren Star (previous credits: Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210) got HBO to air his pilot, Sex and the City was brash, intelligent and, above all, had plenty of depth beneath the gloss. Mysteriously well-off and popular hack Carrie and her turn-of-30 girlfriends reveled in their independence, power and ability to enjoy the thrills of ephemeral physical conquest without guilt. But, in the end, everyone got stung. Without it being said, everyone wanted love, and virtually everyone was deeply lonely and unfulfilled.

 

The promise at the start was amazing, bold and clever, even for the lawless frontier of American cable. Quality took a bath early on – everyone remember Carrie’s grating neuroses upon farting in the bed of Big (Chris Noth)? – but by series end, six years later, Sex and the City found an acceptable velvet rut. By then fatally iconic via the plethora of trash media, the fearless four had mined an unapologetic pride and power in their ability to rally in the face of constant adversity. Yes, the edges were smoothed and nearly every blip on the radar resulted in a convenient group hug, but rather than the feeling being icky, Sex and the City was a guilty pleasure worth having.

 

With extended opening credits catching initiates up with the entire series history, all trendy boroughs of New York City (read: Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan) are open for the thrill of a complex return. Usher, swiftly, to the flat earth: Carrie, rescued from the clutches of dark Russian artist Petrovsky by Big at series end in Paris, has somehow published three books and is about to co-habit with her suave, withdrawn hunk; Samantha has grown rich in L.A. representing her young love, studly actor Smith Jarrod (Jason Lewis), but feels as though she’s lost herself; Miranda seems ready to pop her last rivet holding it together in Brooklyn for the sake of her son, her husband Peter (David Eigenberg) and her institutionalized mother-in-law, who is now heard of but never seen; Charlotte lives in domestic bliss with her blandly wonderful husband Harry (Evan Handler) and their mail-order daughter from China, and really has nothing to complain about – though she shrieks in glee or collapses in tears at the drop of a hat. (Ten years down, she should really look into a prescription for such established advances as lamotrigine or lithium, she’s so frighteningly, organically unstable. Instead, writer-director Michael Patrick King would rather play her for cheap laughs.)

 

With Charlotte hovering about as a slapstick foil, the other three weigh in with the great themes, which essentially amount to the same thing. Having crested 40, they simply want their expensive cakes of love and partnership and want to eat them independently and in determined isolation, too, so long as there aren’t visible signs of caloric intake. Carrie worries about Big’s dominant purchase of a dream Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment, and figures the contract of marriage will solve her dilemma. Though supposedly overloaded with work of loving servitude in Tinseltown, homesick Samantha manages to vacate her sexless partnership and jet back to Manhattan whenever she pleases. Miranda, burned out by career and family, crusts over with a venomous frost when Peter – so guilt-stricken as to be paralytic – confesses to a single, regrettable sexual indiscretion. Charlotte is what a placebo for vanilla would taste like.

 

No spoilers here, save to say that anyone paying attention will come to the obvious conclusions and realizations 90 minutes before everyone on screen does. Real fears of becoming disposable chattel or failing to sustain love spiral below the common denominator into six feet of subterranea. Dumbing down would be putting it too mildly; these four supposedly strong, searching heroines are now insipid, regressive stereotypes whose tacked on epiphanies of love – penned, it should be noted, by a writer-director who has offered up such paper-thin embarrassments as Murphy Brown and Will and Grace in the past – are acutely disingenuous. (More than one critic in the audience laughed when Carrie solemnly tried to pen a column on love, and those four letters lingered lonely on her computer screen.)

 

Samantha throws out the expected f-bomb in an inopportune public moment, but it’s a wince-worthy fizzle. As always, lovers’ kisses are awkward and stagy, and the supposedly explicit sex is Playboy Channel banal. Worst of all, instead of the well-documented fashions being a subtext to the travails of the four, the four are dumbstruck slaves to the designers. (A litany of the expected are repeatedly listed on screen. They’ve paid to advertise there, so I’m not going to give them the time of day here.) When Carrie’s editor at Vogue (Candice Bergen – there’s a bad sign right there) makes her the subject of a sumptuous wedding photo spread in the magazine’s Age Issue, the fame-obsessed columnist is actually gifted a gorgeous designer dress by Vivienne Westwood.

 

Of course, Westwood’s regards are only seen in the handwriting of a card, and aren’t delivered in person. That would be unthinkable. Westwood on-screen would make Samantha look like a Hallmark greeting; the hardened British designer has never been considered pretty, speaks her mind in a heady and savvy blaze of contradiction, charts her own course and doesn’t take crap from anybody.

 

Westwood is a powerful woman in control of her life in 2008. She’s everything Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda have aspired to be for the past 10 years – and everything the four, on evidence this year, have been too blind, small-minded and self-centred to ever be. They’re not just sellouts. They’re closeouts.