The First Wives Club (1996)

The First Wives Club arrives from 1996 with three actresses over forty planted squarely at the center of a studio comedy, a casting choice that carried weight in its era. Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton play women discarded for younger models and then organize. The animating idea is female solidarity as financial strategy, and the film pursues it with a broad, crowd-pleasing grin. The grievance is real. The revenge is cheerful.

The feminist engine here is not subtle and was never meant to be. Gloria Steinem turns up as herself. The women name their crisis center after a friend who jumped from a balcony, and the finale is a street-corner sing-along of "You Don't Own Me." Queerness appears briefly through Annie's daughter, who is a lesbian and a feminist, and through a cameo by Lea DeLaria, though the film treats this as texture, not thesis. The economic critique stays muddy. Our heroines buy out advertising partners and blackmail an electronics tycoon, yet the movie celebrates their arrival into wealth, so the knives never reach capital itself.

The absences tell us as much as the presences. The principals are uniformly white and comfortable, and race never enters the conversation. No environmental concern surfaces. A rival's fat-shaming exists to mark her as a villain, not to launch a movement. Annie's anxiety is played for laughs and a self-esteem arc, which is not the same as representation. Left standing is a brisk revenge comedy that wears its social consciousness openly and still remembers to be funny. That balance is rarer than it should be, and this film, for all its sermonizing impulses, mostly holds it.