The Witches of Eastwick (dir. George Miller, 1987)- Review
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“Sukie Ridgemont is picking zucchini in her garden. The entire garden is overrun with this single vegetable. And the zucchini are huge. She carries them like logs.”
The heavy breathing of screenwriter Michael Cristopher pervades The Witches of Eastwick, an adaptation of the John Updike novel which comes with the sweaty handprints of eighties Hollywood plastered all over it. The film casts three big-name stars — Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon — as ditzy yet shaggable hausfraus, whose powers of necromancy serve mainly to leave them enthralled to Nicholson’s self-proclaimed ‘horny little devil’ Daryl van Horne.
The Witches of Eastwick requires its viewers to follow in the titular witches’ footsteps and throw any sense of propriety or self-respect to the wind in order to buy into the ridiculous, campy, oversexed fantasy of the archetypal middle-aged lech. Naturally, Jack Nicholson is key to this argument. “I am absolutely sure that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met,” Cher’s Alex informs Daryl, after he #MeToo’s her into his bedroom on the pretence of discussing her artwork. “You are vulgar, stupid, insensitive, selfish, egotistical, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humour and you smell. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, and morally reprehensible. You are a creep.” A few pages later, he’s railing her and her two best friends. And somehow, because it’s Jack Nicholson, you go along with it.
Outrageous? Debasing? Oh yes. The attraction of The Witches of Eastwick, like that of Daryl, lies in its swaggering, flagrant greasiness.
Cher — who Nicholson, and the film’s director George Miller, resisted casting on the basis that she ‘wasn’t sexy enough’ — is one of three ‘witches’ who begin the film not as the established coven of Updike’s novel, but a sad, undersexed bunch of fledgling MILFs — the crowd that the girls of Sex and The City or Desperate Housewives would probably bully. Marooned in the social wasteland of Rhode Island, these washed-up old bags — again, played by three of the biggest female stars of the 80s — can’t exert themselves beyond mooning over their snot-nosed progeny and bemoaning their love lives over martinis once a week.
Ponytailed Mephisto Daryl, conjured by the sheer force of their sexual frustration, arrives in town and sets about seducing them with a confusingly balanced deal with the devil. Conventional witchy or satanic pacts tend to offer something along the lines of power, riches, or at the very least a broomstick in exchange for a soul. Satan tempting Jesus in the desert, Goethe’s Faust, Bulgakov’s Woland, all pale in eloquence compared to Daryl: “ I always like a little pussy after lunch. What do you say?”
It’s the appeal of debasement, as Daryl rolls grotesquely around the bed, tiny ponytail bouncing flacidly off his satin sheets, which convinces his cloistered charges to yield — no ham-handed empowerment narrative here, no warts or cauldrons. The satanic pact allows the ‘witches’ to surrender completely to the comforts of bimbofication, leaving the burden of modern womanhood- their lives as working single mothers — at the door of Daryl’s Trump-chic bedroom.
The escape is a welcome and enjoyable one, for viewers as well as witches, because of its meticulous refusal to be remotely serious. Drawing on the barest plot elements of morality tales, chick flicks, and, frankly, pornos, The Witches of Eastwick bundles them together into a film simultaneously so vague on substance and overwhelming in sauciness that it convinces its audience into the orgy as well.
Áine Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.