Film Review: ‘The Other Woman’
Cameron Diaz and Leslie Mann make an effective team in this ungainly yet weirdly compelling revenge comedy.
Justin Chang
Cameron Diaz plays the cool, brittle yin to Leslie Mann’s weepy, whiny yang in “The Other Woman,” an ungainly, often flat-footed yet weirdly compelling romantic dramedy about two gals who become unlikely best friends when they realize they’re being screwed (literally) by the same man. Like a watered-down “Diabolique” or a younger-skewing “First Wives Club,” this latest mainstream rebound from director Nick Cassavetes (after his dead-on-arrival 2012 indie “Yellow”) taps into the pleasures of sisterly solidarity and righteous revenge: Beneath the wobbly pratfalls and the scatological setpieces, there’s no denying the film’s mean-spirited kick, or its more-than-passing interest in what makes its women tick. These qualities should stand the slickly packaged Fox release in good stead with always-underserved female viewers as another superhero-filled summer gets under way.
High-powered New York attorney Carly Whitten (Diaz) doesn’t suffer fools gladly or take dating too seriously, so it’s clearly a big deal when she makes it to eight weeks with a handsome businessman who goes by the none-too-subtle name of Mark King (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). But Carly’s suspicion that the relationship might be too good to be true turns out to be well founded: Dropping by to surprise him one night at his home in Connecticut, she instead has an awkward first encounter with Kate (Mann), who she’s shocked to learn is Mark’s wife.
Furious and disgusted, but also calm and practical, Carly immediately resolves to dump Mark and move on. But Kate isn’t quite so ready to sever ties with her husband’s unwitting mistress: Over the next few days, she turns up at Carly’s law firm — and later, her apartment — in various states of inebriated distress, longing for details about Mark and Carly’s sexual habits, as well as advice on how to proceed. While Carly initially recoils from Kate’s extreme neediness and insecurity, it’s not long before the desperate housewife and the put-together career woman realize they have more in common than they thought, bonding over their loneliness, their mutual loathing for the man who brought them together and, inevitably, their desire for payback.
Things get kicked up a notch when Kate and Carly, tailing Mark on one of his many weekend “business trips” (to the tune of Lalo Schifrin’s “Mission: Impossible” theme), find out that the cad has yet another mistress on layaway: Amber (Kate Upton), a young blonde bombshell who’s introduced running on the beach in slo-mo oglevision. In a development that works better onscreen than it sounds on paper, Amber turns out to be sweet and wholly sympathetic, if mildly ditzy, and she happily joins Kate and Carly’s vengeful sisterhood. Observing all this from the sidelines, meanwhile, is Kate’s sensitive, good-looking brother Phil (Taylor Kinney), who serves as not only a convenient new love interest for Carly, but also the movie’s token acknowledgment that not all men are lying, cheating scumbuckets.
For that matter, there’s room to argue over whether “The Other Woman” (the first-produced screenplay by Melissa K. Stack, whose “I Want to F— Your Sister” landed on the 2007 Black List) is ultimately a femme-empowering celebration of decency and monogamy, or a hopelessly retrograde portrait of scheming, backbiting women incapable of defining themselves apart from a man, even if it’s a man they happen to despise. Certainly there’s something queasy-making, even sadistic, about the increasingly juvenile shenanigans that take over the movie’s second half as Carly, Kate and Amber effectively drop a series of anvils on Mark’s head — whether they’re slipping him laxatives and estrogen tablets, or investigating the offshore bank accounts where he’s stashed away an ill-gotten fortune.
As it winds its way toward an unexpectedly grisly final showdown, “The Other Woman” often feels stranded between gross-out comedy, romantic fantasy and distaff psychodrama in a way that compels fascination and impatience alike. The film’s structure and pacing feel haphazard at best, the musical choices clumsily tacked on, the raunchy elements weak and unnecessary (and likely compromised by the film’s downgrading from an R rating to a PG-13). One moment we’re in the Bahamas, admiring the beachfront scenery as lensed by d.p. Robert Fraisse; the next we’re in a toilet stall, watching (and worse, listening) as a character noisily evacuates his bowels. Similarly, there are moments when Cassavetes seems to be operating on Hollywood-hack autopilot, and others when you can almost feel him nudging the production in the sort of rougher, more offbeat character-driven direction that his famous father, John, might well have encouraged.
This unevenness has become perhaps Cassavetes’ defining aspect as a filmmaker, evident in his unpredictable choice of material (“The Notebook,” “Alpha Dog,” “My Sister’s Keeper”) and in the curious jumble of moods and styles he achieves with almost every picture. Indeed, it’s this sense of tonal clash that largely distinguishes “The Other Woman,” which feels like a movie productively at war with itself, taking its cues from the temperaments of its two central characters: It’s lurching and volatile one minute, judgmental and calculating the next. And it’s a testament to the actresses involved that we emerge with an appreciably strong sense of who their characters are.
Her nerve endings almost continually exposed, her mouth running like crazy, Mann at first seems to be channeling the ball-busting housewife she played in “Knocked Up” and “This Is 40,” but she swiftly establishes Kate as a very different creature — warm and compassionate, and genuinely torn over whether to salvage or further sabotage her marriage. As ever, Mann’s ability to seem perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown can be maddening, even mannered, and “The Other Woman” needs every drop of cool, cynical detachment it can wring from Diaz’s performance. Having memorably embraced her inner rebel in recent projects like “Bad Teacher” and “The Counselor,” Diaz is in fine, nuanced form here, playing a strong-willed, successful woman without reducing her to a one-note shrew.
Model-turned-actress Upton (“The Three Stooges,” “Tower Heist”) holds her own in a likable if limited role, and Coster-Waldau is game enough as the most (only) hated figure onscreen. Rapper-songstress Nicki Minaj makes her live-action thesping debut as Carly’s saucy assistant, while Don Johnson has a few choice scenes as her father. Several stray references to Chinese culture, including a particularly random, teary-eyed defense of feng shui, feel sufficiently jarring as to suggest a half-hearted attempt to woo the all-important Asian market.
For the film's humor to have gone over at all, which it does in spurts, Diaz and Mann had to be totally game and they are that, without question. Both grate at assorted moments, but they're funny and ingratiating too, certainly willing to look foolish in the knowledge that they're playing for the winning team. Upton does what she's called upon to do, look great in a bikini, and rarely has more than one line to speak at a time. Game of Thrones star Coster-Waldau has no trouble convincing that he's the sort of cad who can score whenever and wherever he wants, although the actor who may turn the most heads is Kinney (TV's Chicago Fire) as the available brother. Don Johnson is in briefly as the fives-times-married father of Carly to whom she unaccountably listens for romantic advice.
High-powered New York attorney Carly Whitten (Diaz) doesn’t suffer fools gladly or take dating too seriously, so it’s clearly a big deal when she makes it to eight weeks with a handsome businessman who goes by the none-too-subtle name of Mark King (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). But Carly’s suspicion that the relationship might be too good to be true turns out to be well founded: Dropping by to surprise him one night at his home in Connecticut, she instead has an awkward first encounter with Kate (Mann), who she’s shocked to learn is Mark’s wife.
Furious and disgusted, but also calm and practical, Carly immediately resolves to dump Mark and move on. But Kate isn’t quite so ready to sever ties with her husband’s unwitting mistress: Over the next few days, she turns up at Carly’s law firm — and later, her apartment — in various states of inebriated distress, longing for details about Mark and Carly’s sexual habits, as well as advice on how to proceed. While Carly initially recoils from Kate’s extreme neediness and insecurity, it’s not long before the desperate housewife and the put-together career woman realize they have more in common than they thought, bonding over their loneliness, their mutual loathing for the man who brought them together and, inevitably, their desire for payback.
Things get kicked up a notch when Kate and Carly, tailing Mark on one of his many weekend “business trips” (to the tune of Lalo Schifrin’s “Mission: Impossible” theme), find out that the cad has yet another mistress on layaway: Amber (Kate Upton), a young blonde bombshell who’s introduced running on the beach in slo-mo oglevision. In a development that works better onscreen than it sounds on paper, Amber turns out to be sweet and wholly sympathetic, if mildly ditzy, and she happily joins Kate and Carly’s vengeful sisterhood. Observing all this from the sidelines, meanwhile, is Kate’s sensitive, good-looking brother Phil (Taylor Kinney), who serves as not only a convenient new love interest for Carly, but also the movie’s token acknowledgment that not all men are lying, cheating scumbuckets.
For that matter, there’s room to argue over whether “The Other Woman” (the first-produced screenplay by Melissa K. Stack, whose “I Want to F— Your Sister” landed on the 2007 Black List) is ultimately a femme-empowering celebration of decency and monogamy, or a hopelessly retrograde portrait of scheming, backbiting women incapable of defining themselves apart from a man, even if it’s a man they happen to despise. Certainly there’s something queasy-making, even sadistic, about the increasingly juvenile shenanigans that take over the movie’s second half as Carly, Kate and Amber effectively drop a series of anvils on Mark’s head — whether they’re slipping him laxatives and estrogen tablets, or investigating the offshore bank accounts where he’s stashed away an ill-gotten fortune.
As it winds its way toward an unexpectedly grisly final showdown, “The Other Woman” often feels stranded between gross-out comedy, romantic fantasy and distaff psychodrama in a way that compels fascination and impatience alike. The film’s structure and pacing feel haphazard at best, the musical choices clumsily tacked on, the raunchy elements weak and unnecessary (and likely compromised by the film’s downgrading from an R rating to a PG-13). One moment we’re in the Bahamas, admiring the beachfront scenery as lensed by d.p. Robert Fraisse; the next we’re in a toilet stall, watching (and worse, listening) as a character noisily evacuates his bowels. Similarly, there are moments when Cassavetes seems to be operating on Hollywood-hack autopilot, and others when you can almost feel him nudging the production in the sort of rougher, more offbeat character-driven direction that his famous father, John, might well have encouraged.
This unevenness has become perhaps Cassavetes’ defining aspect as a filmmaker, evident in his unpredictable choice of material (“The Notebook,” “Alpha Dog,” “My Sister’s Keeper”) and in the curious jumble of moods and styles he achieves with almost every picture. Indeed, it’s this sense of tonal clash that largely distinguishes “The Other Woman,” which feels like a movie productively at war with itself, taking its cues from the temperaments of its two central characters: It’s lurching and volatile one minute, judgmental and calculating the next. And it’s a testament to the actresses involved that we emerge with an appreciably strong sense of who their characters are.
Her nerve endings almost continually exposed, her mouth running like crazy, Mann at first seems to be channeling the ball-busting housewife she played in “Knocked Up” and “This Is 40,” but she swiftly establishes Kate as a very different creature — warm and compassionate, and genuinely torn over whether to salvage or further sabotage her marriage. As ever, Mann’s ability to seem perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown can be maddening, even mannered, and “The Other Woman” needs every drop of cool, cynical detachment it can wring from Diaz’s performance. Having memorably embraced her inner rebel in recent projects like “Bad Teacher” and “The Counselor,” Diaz is in fine, nuanced form here, playing a strong-willed, successful woman without reducing her to a one-note shrew.
Model-turned-actress Upton (“The Three Stooges,” “Tower Heist”) holds her own in a likable if limited role, and Coster-Waldau is game enough as the most (only) hated figure onscreen. Rapper-songstress Nicki Minaj makes her live-action thesping debut as Carly’s saucy assistant, while Don Johnson has a few choice scenes as her father. Several stray references to Chinese culture, including a particularly random, teary-eyed defense of feng shui, feel sufficiently jarring as to suggest a half-hearted attempt to woo the all-important Asian market.
The Other Woman: Film Review
Three women stick it to the man who stuck it to all of them in The Other Woman, a female solidarity adultery comedy that's three parts embarrassing farce to one part genuinely comic discharge. Making erratic use of its promising central premise as well as of its uniformly attractive cast, this slick package is nowhere near as good as it could have been but will still hold considerable appeal for female audiences who will enjoy a good joke at the expense of the cheatin' man, while men may not mind going along as well just to check out Kate Upton as this generation's 10.For the film's humor to have gone over at all, which it does in spurts, Diaz and Mann had to be totally game and they are that, without question. Both grate at assorted moments, but they're funny and ingratiating too, certainly willing to look foolish in the knowledge that they're playing for the winning team. Upton does what she's called upon to do, look great in a bikini, and rarely has more than one line to speak at a time. Game of Thrones star Coster-Waldau has no trouble convincing that he's the sort of cad who can score whenever and wherever he wants, although the actor who may turn the most heads is Kinney (TV's Chicago Fire) as the available brother. Don Johnson is in briefly as the fives-times-married father of Carly to whom she unaccountably listens for romantic advice.
UPDATED 04/24/2014
A Female Cooperative Based on Revenge
‘The Other Woman’ Stars Cameron Diaz and Leslie Mann
It takes a lot of heavy weather to snuff out the spark of Cameron Diaz who, at 41, still has the twinkle and bounce of an impish high school cheerleader. With her cornflower-blue eyes and mischievous feline grin, she remains every guy’s ultimate gal pal. One of her gifts as an comic actor is a light touch.
But in “The Other Woman,” Ms. Diaz has her hands full. This female revenge comedy is so dumb, lazy, clumsily assembled and unoriginal, it could crush any actor forced to execute its leaden slapstick gags and mouth its crude, humorless dialogue (by the first-time screenwriter Melissa K. Stack). The movie is directed by Nick Cassavetes, who proves to be much more comfortable playing in soapsuds (“The Notebook”) than managing a comedy. Although Ms. Diaz, as the movie’s cool, cynical voice of truth, barely survives the debacle, you couldn’t describe “The Other Woman” as a guilty pleasure the way you could “Bad Teacher.”
In the opening scene, her character, Carly, a Manhattan corporate lawyer, skips into bed with her boyfriend, Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, from “Game of Thrones”), a handsome investment banker, and they practically devour each other. Her euphoria is shattered, however, when, wearing hot pants and twirling a toilet plunger like a baton, she pays a surprise visit to Mark’s Connecticut home to help him with his plumbing problems. The doorbell is answered not by Mark but by his ditsy wife, Kate (Leslie Mann). Carly had no idea he was married.
In one of the movie’s many conceptual misfires, Ms. Mann’s Kate is a whining, hysterical basket case. Although the role has a few charming moments, it is so overplayed that after a certain point you may want to put fingers in your ears to blot out her shrill, childish harangues. In one half-funny joke, Kate acknowledges that she needs to go to “brain camp.” How about a hospital for a brain transplant?
Eventually, Carly and Kate team up with Amber (Kate Upton), another of Mark’s extramarital playthings, who turn out to be numerous. The three begin plotting revenge. Amber is crassly shoehorned into the movie to provide jiggling eye candy for boys.
“The Other Woman” settles into being a rip-off of the infinitely superior but still minor “First Wives Club,” in which Bette Midler, Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn formed a similar team of women dispensing payback to rats. It begins with such lame stunts as (groan) lacing Mark’s drinks with laxative, which leads to a prolonged, poorly timed bathroom visit milked for maximum humiliation; putting hair remover into his shampoo; and dosing him with estrogen, which swells his nipples.
The women, equipped with field glasses, trail Mark to Southampton and then to the Bahamas for some dirty financial dealings. Along the way, he emerges as not just a bad boy but a sociopathic monster. His ultimate comeuppance, which takes place in a conference room at Carly’s law firm, is the kind of sadistic free-for-all that passes nowadays for farce.
As for Carly’s romantic future, never fear. When Kate’s hunky unmarried brother, Phil (Taylor Kinney), appears early in the film, you know he is the designated prince in waiting. The best line in the movie is a remark by Nicki Minaj, making her live-action big-screen debut as Carly’s sassy office assistant, Lydia: “Selfish people live forever.”
“The Other Woman” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has sexual references and strong language.
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