|     "  H  e  l  l     H  a  t  h     N  o     F  u  r  y  "     |  

Directed by Hugh Wilson

Hell Hath No Fury "The First Wives Club" cashes in on women's insecurities, and shortchanges some fine actresses By STEPHANIE ZACHAREK there's a scene in Hugh Wilson's loathsome comedy "The First Wives Club" where Bette Midler, as a slightly doughy, middle-aged woman whose husband has just discarded her for a fine young filly, confronts the svelte bimbette, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, in a boutique. "Guess the bulimia paid off," Midler snarls, getting a cheap laugh at the expense of another woman's body. (Parker is thin and fit but hardly bulimic looking.) At another point we're treated to a lingering shot of Marcia Gay Harden's legs before we even see her face, a shot that seems to say "Watch out! A woman with legs like this can't be trusted." Heather Locklear, who could teach this movie a thing or two about mean, witty characters, makes a cameo as a smug, self-satisfied husband stealer. (She doesn't even get a line; she's merely a magnet for shooting-dagger looks of scorn and resentment.) And Elizabeth Berkley, all pouty lipliner, fluttering eyelashes and Fluffernutter for brains, breathily tells Goldie Hawn's aging starlet character that she wants to be just like her--"only me!" That's how "The First Wives Club," presumably a feminist movie, tries to get us on the side of its three, middle-aged heroines (Midler, Hawn and Diane Keaton): by pitting them against young, attractive actresses and by suggesting that younger women are whorish gold diggers on the prowl for rich older men, who are such insensitive slobs they desert their faithful, suffering wives. Sisterhood sure is powerful -- as long as you stay away from my man. The movie's three central characters -- you've got your sweet-tempered doormat (Keaton), your insecure, alcoholic sexpot actress (Hawn) and your feisty-but-sensitive overweight wisecracker (Midler) -- are old college friends who reunite after the suicide of a fourth friend. (She jumped off a balcony after her husband left her for...well, you know.) Over lunch, the three discover that they've all lost their husbands to young babes, and they ultimately decide to take action. The movie unfairly generalizes that all men who leave their wives are despicable louts who deserve to be humiliated, but most important, it doesn't give any indication that the women feel a responsibility to fend for themselves. We're supposed to cheer as they show up the cheap-hussy newcomers, sleuth out the dirty little secrets of their husbands' businesses, and finally, teach those wayward hubbies a thing or two by blackmailing them so they can collect enough money to build a women's crisis center. All of this is supposed to make women creeping toward middle age feel good and hopeful and anything but helpless -- the word "empowerment" courses through the picture like a silent mantra. But as badly as the younger women in "The First Wives Club" are treated, none of the three central characters, with whom we're supposed to identify so strongly, comes off that well either. They're so man-dependent that they fall to pieces when their husbands clear out of their high-class digs (all the characters live in posh Manhattan apartments). "The First Wives Club" (based on a novel by Olivia Goldsmith) is designed to cash in on women's deepest insecurities: that as we get older, the threat of becoming outmoded and replaced looms ever larger. Comedies are supposed to tap into people's underlying hostilities -- that's part of what makes them so cathartic. (Robert Zemeckis' 1992 "Death Becomes Her" -- also starring Hawn -- was a terrific send-up of the anxieties the aging process triggers in women, yet the movie was slammed by critics who claimed it was mean-spirited and misogynist.) But what makes "The First Wives Club" so dismal is that it winds up justifying those insecurities. The laughs feel like an excuse for the movie's message, which goes something like "Chins up, ladies! No need to be as pathetic as you obviously are!" The solid supporting cast includes Maggie Smith and Dan Hedaya, who try to keep their heads above water amid the nonsense. But they can't take away the sting of watching the movie's three leads (all looking stunning) play their dirty little game. Midler's character, with her sassy one-liners, goes down the easiest; Hawn's the toughest case. Jokes about the extensive plastic surgery her character has had poke at the way the 50-year-old Hawn doesn't look all that far off from her "Laugh-In" years. She's a good sport about it, but it's hard to laugh at the bimbo jokes Hawn directs at younger women when she's so carefully cultivated her own bimbo persona. Recently Hawn appeared on the cover of In Style, wearing the same white tank top and tight jeans as her teenage daughter. Although her character in "The First Wives Club" lets loose plenty of zingers about the lousy roles Hollywood hands aging actresses, it's no small irony that Hawn tends to go for bubblehead hits like "Private Benjamin" when she's capable of performances as stunning as those in "The Sugarland Express," "Shampoo" and "CrissCross." Even worse, she undermined the best role that came her way, recutting Jonathan Demme's "Swing Shift" to make her character more like the lovable cuddlebunny she's staked her career on -- sabotaging her finest performance in the process. But Keaton comes off worst of all, as a quivering bundle of neuroses who, Hawn quips, doesn't know how to put together a simple declarative sentence. The role shoves her safely into the pigeonhole that her detractors -- people who say she plays the same character over and over again -- have tried to keep her in for years. That her character's name is Annie seems less a tribute than a slam, a way of keeping an astonishing, versatile actress cut-down-to-size and manageable category. "The First Wives Club" is one of those movies that, to show how strong and capable women really are, has to find a neat little space for an uplifting Aretha Franklin number. And sure enough, by the time "Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves" shows up on the soundtrack, the three heroines have all snapped to, discovering that they don't need so much plastic surgery (or booze) after all, that they can lose that extra 15 pounds, that, gosh, they've always had the aptitude for becoming high-powered, big-decision-making execs, only they just didn't know it. The song heaves up just as the women are fixing up an old building, the one that will eventually house their crisis center -- just one of the many points in the movie where the women in the audience are cued to say, "You go, girl!" These sisters are doing it for themselves -- the only problem is they need their husbands' money to do it. Stephanie Zacharek's writing has appeared in Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. She is a regular contributor to Salon.

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