The two best moments of Sex and the City: The Movie were in the first hour. Not long after the opening credits, Candice Bergen playing Carrie’s editor at Vogue cheekily remarks how “forty is the last age a woman can be photographed in a wedding gown without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext” (which is the only clever line in the entire film), and then thirty minutes later, Carrie, a technophobe—a fact one would know only by watching the TV series—announces that she doesn’t know how to use an iPhone. The rest of the movie is a popcorn flick accompanied with sex and designer shoes. In other words, Sex and the City unfolds with the wardrobe, plot, and emotional depth found in the typical episode of Gossip Girl, but instead of budding adolescents, the cast is comprised of aging adults.
Sex and the City assumes that you have (1) watched the TV series (which I have) and (2) you like pretty clothes (which I do). But the movie holds little appeal—or sense—for anyone else. Without the years of screen history, the inside jokes fall flat and the characters become caricatures. Charlotte is the saccharine woman of social status. Miranda is the driven embittered career woman. Carrie is the idealist girlish romantic. Only Samantha—despite her consumerist sex-driven self—attracts any interest. Her impulsive and colorful wisecracks are refreshing compared to her friends’ bland lines.
But even Samantha—as with the others—could not be saved from mediocre writing. Fart jokes, humping dogs, and lingering shots on sculpted derrières are more crude than crafty. What made the TV show brutally honest makes the movie honestly brutal. Crudeness happens in real life and sometimes it can be funny, but the off-color humor presented here makes these women of forty-odd years seem like girls entering their twenties, like they haven’t changed in the past twenty years.
And that is what makes Sex and the City unattractive. Whether or not the audience is familiar with the characters or upcoming plot, the movie drags simply because it doesn’t go anywhere. Miranda learns that she was too selfish. Samantha learns that she is too self-giving. Carrie learns that she is too self-centered. (Charlotte learns that she can get pregnant.) But these lessons don’t have any ramifications, except a new baby (an exciting event made completely unexciting by lack of screen interest), a new apartment (an unexciting event made moderately exciting by a gargantuan closet), and a wedding (an unexciting event made still unexciting by a two-dimensional plot line). Even the end of a relationship brings the four women back together—likely permanently—in New York. Nothing else changes.
At the end of the film, Carrie—through her omniscient voice-over—remarks how “in the same city where they met as girls, four New York women entered the next phase of their lives”. Whoever these women are, they are not Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha. Those women are still the same as they were at the start of the film, and—unlike the rest of us—they will never mature.
