My gripe with the feminism that began to brew in the early 1970's has always been twofold: 1) that it never seemed concerned with anything outside the lives of middle-class white women; and 2) that it never recognized that the men from whom women were supposed to be liberated were just as trapped by the conventions of post-WWII middle class life as women were. Whatever its flaws and shortcomings, and however the promise of feminism fell far short of its goals, one thing remains: Feminism scared the bejeezus out of most men, and it does to his day, Exhibit A being a certain junior Senator from New York who used to be the First Lady; and Exhibit B being the infamous photograph of the current squatter in the White House signing the so-called Partial Birth Abortion bill into law, surrounded by a coterie of grinning, middle-aged white men.

As we're now living in a kind of bizarro reactionary time warp that was created by the Bush Administration out of nostalgia for worst times of the modern era -- the McCarthy witchhunts, the Vietnam quagmire, and the Reagan years, punctuated by the death of St. Ronnie himself, it seems a fortuitous time to remake Bryan Forbes' 1975 film based on Ira Levin's nightmare-in-suburbia novel The Stepford Wives. This one, however, has been created by the man behind Miss Piggy, perhaps the greatest drag queen, and certainly the first drag Muppet, in history, and the man behind Premiere Magazine film "critic" "Libby Gelman-Waxner." When life in the United States is as scary as it is during Bush II: The Sequel, how else to remake a feminist nightmare than to play it as camp?

The basic structure is held over with a few changes: Walter (Matthew Broderick) and Joanna (Nicole Kidman) move to the picturesque town of Stepford, Connecticut, where the wives are perfect homemakers and sex toys and the husbands are all balding nebbishes. Joanna becomes friends with what seem to be the only other normal spouses in town. Together with Bobbie Markowitz (Bette Midler), and the wifely half of the only gay couple in town, Roger Bannister (Roger Bart) they seek to discover what it is in Stepford that turns its women into zombies. The environmental "something in the water" angle of the original film has been excised, for in the age of Shrek and the Roomba vacuum cleaner, these wives are savvy enough to figure it out pretty early on:

"All the women in this town are sex kitten bimbos, and all the men are drooling nerds," Bobbie points out. "Doesn't that seem strange to you?"

"No", Joanna replies. "I work in television."

But screenwriter Rudnick has tacked on an introductory section that seems slapped on from a kind of Philip K. Dick nightmare of a futuristic television network that the millennial Joanna runs in the spirit of the hard-bitten executive she is. It has some scathingly biting bits, such as the Temptation Island-style reality show "I Can Do Better", but it belongs in a very different movie. The end also has a somewhat different twist from the original, one which seems similarly tacked on in an effort to please test audiences.

Aside from Rudnick's nonstop one-liner-laden script, what keeps the proceedings moving is the cast, which approaches the material with zest and seems genuinely to be having a good time. Nicole Kidman starts out as a character not much different from the spouse-killer she played in her breakthrough role in Gus Van Sant's To Die For, and while she's frighteningly skinny, she comports herself well, and even shows some deft comic timing. Matthew Broderick, who subs for John Cusack as Walter (is anyone else having trouble dealing with the fact that the John Hughes High School Repertory Company are all now on the shady side of 40?) always seemed kind of nebbishy to me, even after he morphed into Ferris Bueller and quickly became the coolest guy since Sean Penn had pizza delivered to history class. In recent years, Broderick seems to have decided decided that since he can't be Sean Penn, he might as well be Gene Wilder. In roles from Leopold Bloom in The Producers on Broadway to the persnickety bank manager in You Can Count On Me, he's worked hard to cement his place as the Irish Woody Allen.

Paul Rudnick clearly believes in the It's OK To Knock Your Own Team rule, for his screenplay is rife with broad gay and Jewish stereotypes that would be horrifically offensive coming from the pen of anyone else -- Roger Bannister is a Carson Kressley clone, his partner is a closeted tightass, and the Markowitzes, played by Jon Lovitz and Bette Midler are archetypal loud, vulgar, gluttonous Jews. But because Rudnick is both gay AND Jewish, we can focus instead on just how damn terrific it is to see Bette Midler in a movie again. Midler has always been a Talent In Search Of A Vehicle -- a great comedienne in the tradition of Fanny Brice, who also can belt out a tune. She's bigger than any screen you can put her on, and she makes this role her own. If her own tendency towards camp makes Bobbie's transformation less chilling than that of Paula Prentiss in the original, the sheer lunatic energy she brings to her Martha Stewart-esque new self is horrifying enough.

Be prepared to suspend your belief at the door, for this is supposed to be a Stepford in which BOTH halves of the gay couple are welcome at the Men's club, for all that the queen falls victim to his partner, who for some reason decides to turn him into Rick Santorum. Having the third "girlfriend" be a gay man is an inspired idea, and if Roger Bart plays his character as if auditioning for Queer Eye in Connecticut, he and Midler seem to be having a rollicking good time, and Kidman benefits from being part of the fun.

As the couple who seem to run Stepford, Glenn Close and Christopher Walken simply riff on their own recent reputations. Close, who's rapidly turning into the love child of Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford, is Claire, the town's real-estate agent who's one of those horrifyingly perky, friendly people that make us ironic folk run screaming in the other direction. Hers is probably the best performance in the film, teetering as if on the Jimmy Choo shoes that most of the Stepford women wear on the edge between bliss and hysteria. She does seem a tad long in the tooth to be a Stepford wife, however, an inconsistency explained, not entirely satisfactorily, at the end of the film, even if her marriage to technical mastermind Mike Wellington (Walken) seems to be one of the few age-appropriate ones. Walken, whose innate creepiness has been leavened lately with some pathos, seems to have retained some of Frank Abagnale Sr. in this uncharacteristically understated performance. Patrick O'Neal made the hair on the back of one's neck stand on end in this role in the original film, and this is the kind of camped-up role that seems to be written for Terence Stamp to play in this stage of his career, when he's usually the Designated Creepy Old Man. Now THAT would have been some inspired casting.

One of the most serious problems in the original film also finds its way into this one, and that is in the costuming. The 1975 film positioned the sex kittenish homemakers in almost Edwardian granny dresses with picture hats -- hardly the kind of attire one would expect balding men who are lousy lovers would want their robot wives to wear, unless said men are John Ashcroft. Here the dresses have somewhat lower necklines and higher hemlines, but still look more like Lilly Pulitzer's Garden Party in Palm Beach than like the kind of clothing men would choose for their made-to-order sex toys. Unless I'm completely off-base, most of the men who are like the villainous, insecure jerks of Stepford would prefer something alone the lines of, oh, say, Halle Berry's dominatrix leather in the upcoming Catwoman.

The production design is far more important in this film than in the original, with Stepford being the kind of haven for sprawling, ongepotchket McMansions on equally sprawling lots that people in working class suburbs try to emulate these days. While the kitchens in Forbes' film were merely serviceable, if immaculate, these kitchens are right out of House and Garden -- complete with wrought iron stands laden with home-baked scones sitting on gleaming granite countertops set under hand-polished cherry cabinets built on top of hand-hewn hardwood floors. As I'm measuring my own cabinets to reface them and replace my 1975-vintage laminate countertop with yet more laminate, I've got to admit: I was salivating at the idea of having a kitchen like that.

I read Ira Levin's short novel and saw Bryan Forbes' 1975 film when they were first released, and to this day I find that film one of the scariest and most depressing movies ever made, because ultimately, not much has changed. With the loss of the lifetime job security that once characterized the American workplace, men can no longer afford to hold the role of sole breadwinner sacrosanct. It's interesting that this remake comes out in the same year as the fall of Martha Stewart and the rise of the Fab Five of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to iconic status. Who better embodies the tyranny of the 21st century woman's life than a high-powered executive career woman who earned her millions essentially making women who really aren't able to "do it all" feel inadequate for not hand-painting marzipan cherries for their holiday cakes? And isn't Mike Wellington just a mirror-image, high-tech Fab Five, the former charged by men to turn their uppity, high-powered wives into nonthreatening sex kittens and the latter sent by women to turn their zhlubby, sports-watching, remote-hogging, beer-drinking, "Man Show"-watching troglodyte husbands into designer-clothed, "product"-coiffed, Pottery Barn-furnished romance novel heroes? Is that really any better, for all that the Fab Five are far more personable than either Christopher Walken's or Patrick O'Neal's renditions of the mad scientist who replaces wives with robots? Are we trying to replace our husbands with robots? And if so, is that really the choice women have in men? Boob-obsessed boobs who are fascinated with NASCAR and watching nubile young women jump on trampolines -- or fashion plates more obsessed with wrinkles and wall coverings than we are?

Meanwhile, the women who were breaking free in 1975 of the societal expectations that had trapped their mothers are now nearly thirty years older, and instead of "going natural" as we'd sworn we'd do, we're going to the hairdresser every six weeks to get our hair colored and searching the web for eye creams to perform some kind of magic in the hope that we can escape the pressure to have our eyes done. Younger women, who have largely lived with the choices we like to take credit for giving them, now face a world in which TV shows like MTV's "I Want a Famous Face" invite people to be turned into lookalikes for their favorite celebrities, and "The Swan" becomes a 21st century version of "Queen for a Day", in which eight women go under the knife and come out looking like robots of TV women -- and still, seven of the eight are "losers". In the latest incarnation of "The Bachelor", New York Giants studmuffin Jesse Palmer had the agonizing choice of selecting between two nearly identical Jessica Simpson lookalikes, when a simple eenie-meenie-miney-moe would have done the trick. We don't need men to turn us into robots in order to remake ourselves in the shallowest way possible, we're doing a fine enough job doing it to ourselves.

-- Jill Cozzi

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