When, as a ten-year-old, I watched The Brady Bunch, I knew that there were families in the world who could afford to have a full-time maid and housekeeper—and I knew that my family wasn’t one of those.  Heck, there was a family down the street with hunting dogs, and a bobcat in the freezer.  With the fur on.

And yet I could relate to the Brady kids.  They had to wear the same tacky clothes I did, they listened to the same dorky songs, and—Alice aside—their lives seemed pretty much like mine.  Just with a bigger house and a slightly nicer station wagon.

In The Women, Mary Haines has a cook, too.  And a maid.  And I’m pretty sure they live in a couple of the twenty-odd rooms in Mary’s house that she, her daughter, and her husband don’t occupy on 160-odd acres.

This is the world in which Mary and her three chums—Sylvia, Edie, and Alex—live.  It’s an update of the Hollywood glamour of the 1939 George Cukor original, crossed with a Sex and the City sensibility… as if Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda grew up, got middle-aged, and joined a country club.  Is this a world that anybody really cares about any more?

Mary’s marriage and fashion career are melting down, the pressure of Sylvia’s magazine post is heating up, Edie’s latest pregnancy is getting, well, pretty ripe—and Alex is just plain butch, gaga over a clueless fashion model.

The other women in the story are Mary’s mom—who kind of made a career as a suffering trophy wife—and Crystal, the Other Woman for Mary’s philandering hubby.

Who will shallow Alex fall for next?  With what hysterics will Edie conclude her pregnancy?  How will Sylvia manage to be true to her friends and herself without compromising her career?  How will Mary get her life back on track?  Will Crystal win, or at least learn something?  Will Mary just move on, or fight back?

Most of these questions are just Star Trek Red Shirt distractions.  Alex’s lesbianism is mere stereotyped tokenism, Edie’s only there for comic relief, and Crystal sexes things up with a younger, hornier bod.  Carrie Fisher, Candace Bergen, Cloris Leachman, and others show up just so we can go, “Look! It’s Carrie! It’s Candace! It’s Cloris!”

The core of the story is really Sylvia’s relationship with Mary, and Annette Bening and Meg Ryan as the two gamely make a go of getting us to believe that these two women are actually friends; but when the Big Scene comes and the two have to sell us on both anger and loving tears, audiences are most likely to respond, “Not so much.”

The Women is certainly a better-made film than either Sex and the City or Mamma Mia!, this summer’s big heat-seeking demographic missiles.  But what those films lacked in technical competence, they more than made up for with chemistry and charisma.

For whatever reason, Bening and Ryan don’t click.  And it’s hard to care about Mary and Sylvia when we really aren’t convinced they care about each other… and when maids, cooks, lofts, and luncheons on the lawn just seem so, well, old-fashioned and silly.

While it’s sure to capture a share of the Sex-Mamma market—and it really is a decently-made film, despite some awkward split-screen effects and overly long takes—The Women is not a film that audiences will have readily forgotten by the end of the year.

The Women is rated PG-13 for “sex-related material, language, some drug use and brief smoking.”  This is pretty tame stuff as films targeted at mature adults go.  If you think your teens might be interested in a story about middle-aged women, by all means drag them along.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of The Women.