The Witches of Eastwick (1987)

The Witches of Eastwick arrives from 1987, a year when three women could top a marquee and the industry would still call it a novelty. George Miller directs John Updike's novel with a cartoonist's energy, and the studio assembled Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer as a trio of unwitting witches in a Rhode Island village. The production history is instructive. Sarandon learned she had been reassigned to a different role on the day she arrived on location, and Miller reportedly told Cher, the day after her fortieth birthday, that she was too old and insufficiently alluring for the part. The film's commitment to progressive casting begins and ends with the count of women in the credits. The town is white, the marriages are heterosexual, and nobody involved seems troubled by either fact.

A modest feminist reading survives the wreckage. Three dissatisfied women, each abandoned by a husband, form an accidental coven and eventually destroy the man who seduced and discarded them. Their weapon is a voodoo doll and their victory is a shared household raising four sons. That is a genuine arc of female solidarity, and it is undercut by nearly everything around it. The women spend the middle act competing for Daryl's attention, and Nicholson dominates the frame with the enthusiasm of a man who has been told the film is about him. It is.

The remaining categories return empty. Eastwick has no racial consciousness to speak of, no climate anxieties, no critique of Daryl's obscene wealth, no interest in bodies outside a narrow specification, and no neurodivergent characters. The mansion sits on a site where witches were once executed, a detail the film mentions and then discards without revising any history. Most striking is the absence of sermonizing. This is a comedy that wants to amuse, and it does, without pausing to instruct anyone.