Bewitched (2005)

Bewitched arrives with a premise that promises a rich seam of cultural commentary and delivers a shallow one. Nora Ephron, a director with an established feel for the romantic comedy, takes the 1960s sitcom and folds it back on itself: Will Ferrell plays a narcissistic actor remaking the show, and Nicole Kidman plays the actual witch cast opposite him. The meta-layer is the joke, and the joke is mostly about television vanity. The film's interest in social questions begins and ends there.

Kidman's Isabel does carry a modest thread of self-assertion. She wants a normal life, then learns her co-star has connived to keep her silent on camera, and she objects to being a decorative prop. That is a real grievance, cleanly stated. The resolution, however, arrives by love spell, marriage proposal, and a hex that ships an inconvenient wife off to Iceland. The empowerment registers, then evaporates.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. David Alan Grier and Kristin Chenoweth appear in support, and the film asks nothing of their presence beyond the joke at hand. Race is not a subject. Neither is sexuality, climate, body image, neurodivergence, nor any history that requires revising. Even the show-business satire stops short of indicting money itself, content to mock one actor's ego and call it a day. The film lectures no one, which is its small mercy and the reason its cultural inventory reads as an empty shelf, dusted and labeled. We score what is on the glass, and there is very little on the glass. A light pour. A short finish. The sommelier sets down his pen and reaches for the next bottle with the air of a man who has learned to expect nothing and is rarely disappointed by the expectation itself.

Bewitched opened to unkind reviews and a Razzie for its leads' screen chemistry, and it sits in the 2005 amber of a studio comedy that wanted only to be charming.