Four years after hanging up its designer duds, the iconic TV series Sex and the City is back, this time in a big-screen edition. Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte have certainly aged well enough (as have the ladies playing the iconic quartet, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall and Kristin Davis, respectively), but time has not been quite as kind to out writer-director Michael Patrick King’s beloved creation. The reunion is fun and predictably fabulous—The fashions! The shoes! The hot boyfriends! The funny gay best friends! The female bonding!—but the movie eventually totters on its expensive Manolo Blahniks, trying to stay upright for too long, gorging on too much of a good thing. The chiffon-thin storylines (all four of them) are awfully predictable and, even with three fashion montages; 400,000 haute couture outfits; and one really hot new piece of naked male eye candy (Gilles Marini), Sex and the City starts to wear out its welcome before the de rigeur cosmos finally make their appearance. Episodes of the series, the equivalent of a perfect one-nighter, were in and out in 30 minutes, while the movie—clocking in at 142 minutes—squanders its urban fairy-tale goodwill by simply hanging around too long. Fun and frothy as it is, fleet of foot it’s not.
But before the movie turns into the fashion model who won’t leave the runway, Carrie & Co. are just as fun to hang with as they always were, and the movie quickly drew me back into the fold. As Parker (in voiceover) brings us up to date on the characters during the clever opening credit sequence, I was remembering why I loved the series so much. They had me at the first designer outfit and the appearance of Big (Chris Noth), Carrie’s longtime, hunky love interest. King understands very well that this is a movie (like the series) that revolves around objectification and conspicuous fantasy consumption. It really is the ultimate urban chick flick/gay fantasy film.
It’s ‘three books and three years later’ as Big and Carrie, still not betrothed, decide to move in together. Big buys Carrie the dream New York apartment—a lavish penthouse—and seals the deal with a Joan Crawford-sized closet for her endless outfits and shoes. (The building agent is played by out actor Malcolm Gets). Miranda, meanwhile, is coping with motherhood, her intense career and marriage to cutie-pie Steve (David Eigenberg). Charlotte is raising the little Asian girl she adopted with Jewish husband Harry (Evan Handler), and Samantha has moved to L.A. with her gorgeous boy-toy Smith (Jason Lewis), and turned him into a TV star.
Carrie gets nervous (naturally) about giving up her apartment (read: independence) without a wedding ring and, without batting an eye, Big agrees to get married. ‘You’re a great man-friend,’ Carrie squeals to Big, but the impending nuptials quickly become perfect fodder for a ‘Bridezilla’ episode. Carrie’s Vogue editor (Candace Bergen) wants her to appear in their ‘age’ issue as the example of the perfect 40-year-old bride and, faced with all the designer wedding gowns, Carrie can’t resist. And King, knowing his audience, brings on the first of the fashion montages—the bridal gown photo shoot to die for.
King also knows that the audience demands a price from its modern-day Cinderella—she must give up some happiness (at least temporarily) in exchange for all the fairy-tale trappings. As the wedding plans grow, so does Big’s anxiety—until finally he literally leaves Carrie in her Vivienne Westwood gown and bluebird-of-happiness hair accent (literally stuck to the side of her Bride of Frankenstein hairdo) at the altar. (The sequence is stupefying in its unbelievability, and it’s a real groaner. It’s the movie’s biggest misstep.)
The movie, like Carrie, takes a while to recover from this over-the-top sequence but more fashion montages, a side trip to Mexico with the gals, and focusing on the other ladies and their problems helps. Miranda is trying to forgive Steve for cheating, Kristin is pregnant and Samantha is bored with California, in general, and her relationship with Smith, in particular, and pines for the stud next door (Marini) she sees boffing a series of sexy bimbettes. As these stories play out, Carrie gets her apartment back, gains an assistant named Louise (Chicagoan Jennifer Hudson in her first screen role since her Oscar-winning turn in Dreamgirls), and slowly opens her heart to the idea of forgiving Big.
Sadly, Hudson’s role only offers her a few opportunities to bring her signature sass to the part and, though she’s called Carrie’s ‘assistant,’ it’s still the maid role. Why couldn’t King have added someone to the SATC quartet who could hold her own and bring something to the party—like evil fashion doyenne Wilhelmina Slater of TV’s ‘Ugly Betty’ (so expertly played by Vanessa Williams) ? Hudson certainly could have played that just as easily as this cow-eyed, ‘I-came-to-New-York-for-love,’ thankless part.
All the subplots occur as we go through a fantasy of New York seasons, thanks to the art department, but King is smart enough to know that, eventually, things need to head back to the inevitable—will Carrie and Big finally make it to the altar?—and King will certainly make fans happy with the movie’s last, ‘secret’ 20 minutes.
For all the quibbles, with some judicious cutting Sex and the City the movie would have had just the right zip (though more laugh time for Mario Cantone and Willie Garson, as the gay best friends, would have been nice) but even at the pumped-up length the movie still has plenty of fizz (and Aaron Zigman’s Latin-lite score utilizing the show’s ubiquitous theme music helps). There’s still enough of a cosmo buzz in this Sex to recommend you order it up.
Check out my archived reviews at www.windycitytimes.com or www.knightatthemovies.com. Readers can leave feedback at the latter Web site, where there is also ordering information on my book of collected film reviews, Knight at the Movies 2004-2006.