There is, however, a schticky pair of token Jews, played by Jon Lovitz and Bette Midler, whose character, until she is robotized, is a slovenly, loud-mouthed novelist and one of Joanna's few friends.
Rudnick is best at forging tiny verbal darts that tickle more than they sting. (Late in the game, Joanna discovers that one of the robot-designers once worked for AOL. "Is that why the women are so slow?" she asks.) Occasionally, as in the film's clever, cautionary view of gay marriage, you might intuit a crackle of genuine satire, but for the most part The Stepford Wives is as cheerful and inoffensive as its title characters. Every time you think it might be venturing toward social criticism, it pulls back into homily and reassurance, refusing to tell anyone in the audience anything she -- or he -- might not want to hear.
There are, of course, some real tensions and resentments embedded in this story -- the hard choices facing ambitious women, the immaturity and misogyny that surge through so much popular culture, a rampaging materialism that makes the Stepford of 1975 look like a kibbutz -- but the movie, especially in its disastrous and nonsensical final act, works as hard as it can to suppress them.
The Stepford Wives is, in other words, the opposite of satire. It is intended not to provoke but to soothe, to tell us, once again, that we can have it all, that nobody's perfect, and that if there is trouble in the world, or in our own homes, it's nothing we need to worry our pretty little heads about.
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