I ran from the theatre.
On a few occasions over the years, I have walked out of a film before it finished, but this time I stayed until the end. Then I ran.
I hated Sex and the City.
Now, I know what you are going to say: this was never a film meant for me, and I had no right to be there in the first place. Maybe you are right. There were four women sitting behind me, kvetching about their husbands, and the half dozen to my right had cellphones, pagers, and screaming children. I was outnumbered, but I came to the theatre interested. I was not a fanatical follower of the HBO series, but I respected what the program tried to do in upsetting the tedious pabulum of network television. I like Sarah Jessica Parker, and I think her Carrie Bradshaw character is complex and watchable.
This film is neither.
The conflict is created by her fiancee’s cold feet. Goaded into goading Mr. Big into marriage by her increasingly shrill and unsympathetic friend Miranda Hobbes, Carrie is left at the altar. The problem is that this development takes forty-five minutes to present itself, a tedious period taken up with the veneration of fashion labels so central to the success of the series. Unfortunately, it has never been so blatant, never such a distraction from the plot. The remaining hour-and-a-half churns its way towards an inevitable happy ending by introducing us to a new character, Carrie’s assistant Louise, played without charm by Jennifer Hudson. No one behind the paper-thin script sees fit to integrate Louise with Carrie’s circle of friends, and her scenes are thus oddly disjointed. As for Miranda, Charlotte, and even Samantha, their storylines could not hold your attention for even a segment of an episode of the old series.
But worst done by of all are the men, of course. Chris Noth (as Mr. Big) and Evan Handler (as Charlotte's husband Harry Rosenblatt) play to type, and we get only a hint of the complexity of the former, even as his life is shaken and shaken again. David Eigenberg (as Miranda’s Steve Brady) gets to revisit something like an old storyline, and Jason Lewis (as Samantha’s Smith Jerrod) is eye candy without the opportunity to put his wares on display. Gilles Marini (as Samantha’s neighbor Dante) gets the only exposure one will remember.
The only justification for making this film, beyond the big windfall for all involved, would be if Parker and her peers had one more story they were dying to tell. There is no such story here. I cannot imagine that people who felt betrayed by the “conventional” ending of the series will feel vindicated here, though I could hear sad reprisals of 90s “grlllpower” echoing behind me as I made it to the door.
