As I suffered through the nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime of Sex and the City 2, I kept asking myself: What might I have done wrong, in a past life or in this one, that I deserve to have my eyeballs seared by Sarah Jessica Parker's loony desert-princess getups? To suffer the agony of watching four actresses who have previously given me so much pleasure become undone by crap dialogue and, in one case, an overinflated ego? To gaze upon a couple of amazingly well-groomed camels and realize that they have better hairdos than the human movie stars astride them?
Even in the context of that lumpy, overpriced Birkin bag of stuff we call Hollywood product, Sex and the City 2 hits a new low of idiocy and crassness. There are lots of problems with mainstream Hollywood movies today: A tendency toward fast cutting as a substitute for clear action, storytelling that relies too heavily on dialogue and too little on visual information, an overall samey-sameness as studios desperately repeat any formula that has made them big money in the past. But Sex and the City 2 -- perhaps even more so than its 2008 movie predecessor -- is a sad and ugly example of how terrific television can mutate into something that feels a lot like torture porn. No, scratch that -- torture porn may be unpleasant to watch, but at least it's honest about its motives. And the clothes are less of a horror show.
There's very little plot in Sex and the City 2, which, like its predecessor, was written and directed by Michael Patrick King, based on characters created by Candace Bushnell (which were further fleshed out by Darren Star, creator of the HBO television series). But who needs a plot when you've got -- squeeee! -- cosmos and Louboutins and enough costume changes to outfit at least three separate amateur Gilbert & Sullivan productions? Sex and the City 2 proceeds not from plot point to plot point but from outfit to outfit, beginning with Parker's Carrie Bradshaw reflecting on her old, single life in the city (complete with flashbacks to 1986, represented by the era's ubiquitous big hair and bad sneakers). Flash forward to the present day: Carrie and her pals, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda (Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon) are attending the wedding of two of their dearest friends, Stanford and Anthony (Willie Garson and Mario Cantone). Carrie, the best woman, is wearing a man's tux and strangely crimped hair; later, she adds a black lace crown that looks like something the Wicked Queen in Snow White might have worn, just because she's crazy that way.
Other stuff happens: Carrie thinks her marriage to John/Mr. Big (Chris Noth) is getting a little too routine, never stopping to think that perhaps he's beginning to wonder how he found himself married to a woman who insists on wearing a bra and a nightgown to bed. Meanwhile, other women are not wearing enough bras: The friendly, capable Irish nanny Charlotte has hired to watch over her two moppets (a misused Alice Eve) has huge knockers and joyfully refuses to harness them into submission. Charlotte worries that her sweetheart of a husband (played by the refreshingly straightforward Evan Handler, who appears in far too few scenes) might be tempted to cheat, a thought that understandably distresses her.
In other news, Miranda is stressed out by a job she hates; apparently, King couldn't be bothered to come up with a reasonably sexy conflict for her to resolve. And although Samantha is going through menopause (much hilarity ensues whenever she suffers a hot flash), she looks as sexy as ever. She flirts with a rich sheik, who invites her to come to Abu Dhabi for an all-expenses-paid vacation -- he wants her to see what he calls the "new" Middle East. She wangles additional invites for her besties, and so this happy, chattery jumble of privileged white women arrive at the luxury resort where Mr. Sheik has set them up in lavish style, with private cars to take them anywhere they'd like to go and dutiful personal servants to peel their grapes for them.
But the women are very surprised to learn that even this "new" Middle East is very different from home. They slither from the rocks under which they've been living for the past 40-odd years to learn that many Muslim women wear the hijab, often complete with the niqab, which covers the mouth. Carrie looks at these poor dears with pity and condescension, using her brilliant powers of deduction to ascertain that this is a way for Muslim men to control their women. "It's like they don't want them to have a voice," she says with a small shudder, before we're treated to more scenes of the fab four cavorting in their sequins and silk jersey as they avail themselves of the nice digs and great food provided by the generous Mr. Sheik.
If you're wondering what's wrong with this picture -- or, more specifically, how many hundreds of things are wrong with it -- you're not alone. But you should also know that many lessons will be learned by all during the course of Sex and the City 2: This isn't just a movie, but a journey of discovery. By movie's end, we'll know that Liza Minnelli, who makes a brief appearance, still has great gams; that kissing an old boyfriend is, when you're married, really, really bad; and that Muslim women actually love glittery clothes as much as regular New York fashion types do, which makes them sisters under the skin. Phew! What a relief to know they aren't just oppressed weirdos with bad style.
The fact that Sex and the City 2 is shallow and glitzy isn't necessarily the problem: One of the reasons we go to the movies is to take pleasure in surfaces; beautiful clothes and interesting faces are part of the currency of film. But even though the movie does, here and there, feature some genuinely pretty clothes as opposed to just willfully ugly, oddball combinations (the costumer here is the much-lauded stylist Patricia Field), they're presented in a way that's calculated and flat rather than sumptuous and inspiring. There's slinky vintage Halston, some pouffy Dior, a number of fanciful Brian Atwood shoe creations -- and yet these things are paraded past us at an alarming rate, divorced from any meaning or context beyond their sheer ubiquity. There's no time to fall in love with them; in the end we can only catalog them.
It's a drag, too, that the actresses locked in these clothes don't at least have some decent dialogue to work with. That's particularly unsettling when you consider that the genesis of both of these misguided movies lies in a television show that was once genuinely great, a mix of sparkling writing and chemistry between actors that approached champagne-bubble perfection. Davis and Nixon, in particular, have little to do here, though they do share the movie's single best scene. As the two other women flounce off on dinner dates, Charlotte and Miranda share a few cocktails and pour out their secret frustrations about motherhood. Davis (who, in my opinion, was the secret weapon in the last few seasons of the show) is particularly lovely here; Charlotte is wide-eyed and completely receptive to common wisdom, but once she starts questioning why any wisdom should be accepted as common, her eyes take on a mischievous gleam. In this scene she describes to Miranda how crazy her two kids make her, and her sweetness morphs into a kind of comical dementia; it's the most honest, and funniest, sequence in the movie.
Cattrall, with her foxy smile, looks wonderful, but no actress deserves to be saddled with so many menopause jokes. (She also delivers, gamely, the movie's worst line, a joke whose punchline is "Lawrence of My Labia.") Of the four, though, it's Parker who's most unbearable. It's not her fault that she's badly served by an array of truly terrible hairdos. (In one scene, she's done up in a scarf-and-diadem combo that makes her look like Ozma of Oz.) But even if you're able to look past the misguided coifs, there's not much to see. Parker was once a marvelous comic actress, and she may be again. But her once-perfect timing has been replaced by preening self-consciousness. She always seems to be adding an extra beat, as if to give us an additional sliver of time to note the expressive and sympathetic look in her eye, or the dazzling Ultra-Brite quality of her smile, or the way she wears a Dior ballgown -- for a shopping jaunt in a souk, no less -- with as much devil-may-care ease as if it were a sundress and flip-flops. Parker no longer acts; instead, she puts herself on display, and it's not nearly the same thing. Her swanning is exhausting to watch, and the movie seems constructed to stroke her vanity. At one point, Big compares her beauty to that of Claudette Colbert, and she accepts the compliment not as if it were a sweet and generous thing to say but as if it were fact.
Sex and the City 2 flirts with, and drops, some potentially interesting ideas -- Carrie and Big's decision not to have children, for example, and how outsiders judge them for it. Maybe a better script would have nudged Parker out of her all-too-comfortable comfort zone. But King seems to know he doesn't have to work that hard. All he has to do is furnish a barely adequate girls' night out movie and watch the box-office receipts roll in.
In its television incarnation, Sex and the City both poked fun at and sympathized with modern women who didn't want to have to settle for less, whatever "less" might be. Now the franchise is making money off moviegoers, many of them women, who are happy to settle for less without ever asking for more. A decent story, witty dialogue, scenes that give good actresses something to do: Sex and the City 2 holds all of those things far out of reach, maybe because someone at the top thinks that the womenfolk out there in the audience, if they're distracted by enough sequins and silly hats, won't notice what's missing. Thanks for that, Mr. Sheik, whoever you are. But next time I think I'll pass.