Hollywood’s feminist formula combines politics and romantasy.
In 1998, one of the finest American movies, Beloved, got trounced at the box office by the meretricious, antic-laden fantasy Practical Magic. Beloved was Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece, an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize–winning novel, in which Demme expressed his multicultural humanism through serious, art-film imagination that evoked a slave woman’s experience immediately following the Civil War. Reaching both D. W. Griffith — and Carl Dreyer — level perception of female experience in Intolerance, Way Down East, Broken Blossoms, Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, and Gertrud, Demme conveyed lyrical, black American gospel intensity whereas Practical Magic merely toyed with an idea equating modern female empowerment with witchcraft. Demme redeemed the horror of Silence of the Lambs with an ecstatic, pop-gospel vision of his renowned multiculturalism. It was a high point of Hollywood’s humanist potential. But Beloved’s failure to win popularity was also a glimpse of Hollywood’s decline.
The fact that Hollywood took almost 30 years to rejigger Practical Magic 2 only confirms the film industry’s current insanity. In the first film, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman portrayed Sally and Gillian Owens, Massachusetts sisters in a family of witches who can never fall in love — a curse dooms their paramours to die. Practical Magic 2 continues the story and accommodates today’s heartless feminist priorities. It shifts the plot to England, where the Owens witches, including Sally’s nondescript daughters Kylie and Antonia (Joey King and Maisie Williams), travel to discover their complicated heritage.
Practical Magic 2 inadvertently exposes the mechanics of sequelitis. The franchise is based on the 1995 novel by Alice Hoffman, who had previously cashed in with three prequel books: The Rules of Magic (2017), Magic Lessons (2020), and this film’s source, The Book of Magic (2021). As directed by Danish feminist auteur Susanne Bier, PM2 indulges what the publishing industry calls “romantasy.” Back during the 1990s indie era, female movie executives from Denise Di Novi, who produced Practical Magic, to Oprah Winfrey, who produced Beloved, dreamed of power — Practical Magic grossed $95 million to Beloved’s paltry $22 million. It became a contest of witchcraft as agency versus personal struggle over supernatural historical evil.
Now, Millennial Hollywood desperately aims for the political occultism considered “equity.” PM2’s privileged white characters mildly satirize proper female sexuality, reputation, and speech for the Gen Z feminists who no longer relate to middle-aged Bullock and Kidman but may want to play out issues of gender identity and generational wealth. And subtle misandry is obvious in the male-mortality gimmick repeated with Kylie as well as the sly nod to lesbian solidarity with Antonia.
Commercialized progressive Hollywood can show allegiance to feminism only through resentment — which differs from the depth that Jonathan Demme shared with Toni Morrison. PM2 brings back the superficial politics epitomized in Arthur Miller’s Salem-witch-trial drama The Crucible, in which young Abigail cries to her adulterous preacher-lover John Proctor, “I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes? I will not, I cannot!”
That speech is known to directly express an enlightened woman’s confrontation with the constraints and hypocrisies of patriarchal society. Bullock, Kidman, plus Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing co-starring as family witches, should have known better than to join this mockery of false piety that ends improbably with an homage to Mary Poppins. Their actual patroness is Oprah Winfrey, who went into a spiral of social justice efforts after Beloved flopped.
It’s almost inconceivable that Hollywood continues selling product as tawdry as the first Practical Magic, but this sequel is even more egregious than the original. Going from Griffin Dunne directing to Bier is not progress, just a tokenistic delusion that fits with the dubious agency of such films as Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, Celine Song’s Past Lives, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is, and Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling and The Invite. The misery in all these films stems not just from a psycho-sociological condition (former National Organization for Women president Tammy Bruce has observed that “feminism is having a nervous breakdown”) but from industry doldrums.
Hollywood once made movies that were called “women’s pictures” to describe a genre and honor a market. Now, in the era when a Supreme Court justice cannot define what a woman is, it makes films that exploit female sensitivities for political purposes. It’s bad alchemy.
