Living in suburbia, married to a machine

The Stepford Wives, Frank Oz's madcap re-engineering of a dusty, second-rate thriller from 1975, opens with a montage of happy housewives and their household gadgets. Making fun of images like these -- smiling women in Eisenhower-era perms and evening gowns swooning over their automated kitchen cabinets -- has become such a tiresome pop-culture staple that you may wonder if the movie has anything new to say about feminism, suburbia or consumer society. The answer is not really, but it does manage to fire off a handful of decent jokes and a few sneaky insights before losing its nerve and collapsing into incoherence.

The source for both this film and the earlier one, which starred Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss, is a slim, efficient novel by Ira Levin that uses the conventions of suspense fiction as a vehicle for allegory and social satire. Levin's Stepford, Connecticut, was a pleasant middle-class suburb whose menfolk, threatened by the rather mild feminism of their wives, killed them off and replaced them with subservient, sexually compliant robots.

The first Stepford Wives exploited the horror-movie implications of this premise, rather than its comic possibilities. Oz and Paul Rudnick, the screenwriter, swerve maniacally in the opposite direction, whipping up a gaudy, noisy farce that perpetually threatens to spin out of control and eventually does. The music, by David Arnold, is full of overdone, campy melodrama, like an Elmer Bernstein score for a Three Stooges picture. The performances -- in particular that of Glenn Close as Stepford's robot matriarch -- are both sly and overstated, giving Rudnick's sneaky one-liners a chance to be heard amid the cacophonous silliness.

Needless to say, a lot has changed in 30 years: now, Stepford is a gated subdivision full of late-model SUVs and sprawling stone McMansions, where a gay couple is welcomed and where everyone is white. (In Levin's novel a black family had just come to town, but I guess they've moved away.) Sexual politics have also come a long way. Joanna Eberhart, who dabbled in photography when she was played by Ross, is now, in the person of Nicole Kidman, the ruthless, ambitious head of a television network.

Fired in the wake of a reality-show disaster, Joanna has a quick nervous breakdown and is then spirited off to Stepford by her nebbishy, beta-male husband, Walter (Matthew Broderick).

In the earlier Stepford, the flight from New York was implicitly motivated by fear of urban chaos and social collapse. This time, though, the Eberharts are fleeing from the soul-emptying consequences of their own ambition, seeking out the cozy simplicity of an affluent world in which no one seems to have, or to need, a job. The husbands, a collection of lumpy, khaki-wearing dweebs (with the exception of Christopher Walken, their guru of old-school masculinity), congregate in the clubby headquarters of the Men's Association, which is also where their robot workshop is housed. The wives, meanwhile, cheerfully perform their household and bedroom duties, steered by personalized brass remote-control devices wielded by their owners -- 'er, mates.

Though Joanna is repelled by the empty-headed obedience of the Stepford wives, she also wants to repair the damage that her career has inflicted on her husband and children. This damage is mentioned rather than shown, and the repair work is highly theoretical, since children in Stepford are only slightly more visible than black people.