Release Date: April 25, 2014Writer: Melissa Stack
Director: Nick Cassavetes
Logline: After discovering her boyfriend is married, Carly soon meets the wife he's been cheating on. And when yet another affair is discovered, all three women team up to plot mutual revenge on the three-timing SOB.
Bechdel Test: Embarrassingly only passes 2 out of 3 tests.
Review
To get this out of the way: I did not hate this movie. It was perfect for a quiet Saturday morning and I would totally watch again if I stumbled across it playing on TBS. Leslie Mann was great, there was an awesome closet hang out scene and I’m still obsessed with the line “Martha Stewart did prison like a boss.” I'm also ecstatic that a film with 3 female leads is doing well at the box office.
That being said, this film was a disappointment. You would think a movie with three female leads would pass the Bechdel Test with flying colours but The Other Woman only passed 2 of the 3 tests. Not one conversation was about something other than a man. Of course, you could dissect every conversation into individual sentences and give it a pass based on that - but every sentence that was about a random subject was immediately followed by one about a man. In a movie that is being marketed as a female-friendship/woman-empowerment story, that’s not good enough.
I went in thinking that this was going to be my modern day First Wives Club, instead I got a movie about one dimensional women who value personal gain above all else. When you put the two films in comparison, it’s even more evident how much more The Other Woman could have done.
In The First Wives Club, there are entire scenes where the women never even mention a man. They talk about things that are truly unique to their own personal journeys outside of their relationships; their careers, fear of aging and their past. They are brutally honest with each other and that vulnerability makes their friendship genuine and real. The movie begins with them together and ends with them together - at its core it’s truly a movie about their relationships with each other.
The friendships in TOW feel forced and shallow. It's great that they all hang out and drink together but what else is holding them together besides their common experiences with Nick? The movie begins with them on separate paths and ends with them having separate successes. One gets a career boost, one gets married, and one gets knocked up by Lady Gaga's boyfriend. After all this female bonding, they still find their ultimate happiness in men or approval from men.
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| Kate Upton, Cameron Diaz and Leslie Mann in The Other Woman |
This film isn’t really a female friendship movie -it’s a typical romcom that happens to have women being friends in it. If you're just looking for a light movie with a ton of physical comedy and way too many boob shots, that's okay. If you're looking for a film that presents complex female characters and genuine friendship between women, look elsewhere.
Portrayal of Women: It’s hard to understand why TOW failed so miserably in establishing really great female characters when FWC did exactly that more than 15 years ago with a similar premise. Where is the progress in our romantic comedies?
We basically don’t know anything about the women in TOW except for what their relationship to Mark is. Sure, Carly (Diaz) is a lawyer but did she struggle to get her job, does she like it, is she good at it? Kate (Mann) says she gave up her life for Mark, what does that look like? Did she have a career, did she have ambitions, what does she even do every day? All we know about Amber is that she looks pretty not bad in a bikini. Enlightening.
They fit into the same basic stereotypes that the women of FWC did - ambitious bitch, brainless beauty, and spazzy nice girl. Unfortunately, they don't transcend these stereotypes like the women of FWC did. Instead they play right into them until they are magically "fixed" at the end.
One thing that did really bother me is the stupidity of both Mann and Upton's characters. The only character that gets to be smart is Diaz', and of course, her brains leave no capacity to be anything other than a bitch. I don't want to laugh at girls being stupid anymore and I don't want to be expected to assume smart girls are bitchy either.
Sisterhood Moment: That drunken closet scene was pretty killer. Nothing says "let's be besties" more than wine induced hair braiding.
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| First Wives Club |
I will leave you with the suggestion to check out The First Wives Club, if you haven't before. This closing shot has more heart than The Other Woman's entire plot could even hope to have (click here).
IMDb - The Other Woman (6.5)
Wikipedia - The Other Woman
Rotten Tomatoes - The Other Woman (25%)
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