I have a lot of complex feels about The Other Woman (firstly should it not be Women not Woman?!). I am really glad that a comedy starring two women and featuring a third has been so successful – it is currently sitting in the No. 2 spot for box office takings under The Amazing Spiderman. I think it just goes to show how thirsty people are for movies with more than one woman in them. Despite its box office takings, The Other Woman has a score of 24 percent on the critic aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes; this is extremely low. This movie is not amazing but it is not the D-grade movie that this rating makes it out to be. In comparison the Seth Rogen and friends comedy vehicle This is The End rated a healthy 83 percent despite in my opinion being decidedly average and verging on terrible for its heavy reliance on rape jokes.
The plot centres on three women: Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, and Kate Upton who play Carly – high powered lawyer and accidental other woman, Kate – quirky wife who talks a lot and has forgotten the grooming required by all women necessary to maintain a man, and Amber – the boobs (they actually refer to her as this in the movie). I’m not sure if you can actually say that Kate Upton actually stars in this movie as she has barely any dialogue.
The premise is that Carly is dating a guy and finds out by chance that he is actually married to Kate. The two of them then go on to plot their revenge against him and discover that he is cheating on them with a third woman, Amber, who is devastated to discover his lies and teams up with them to make him suffer. One of the nice parts of the movie is it’s overarching premise is that even though these three women discover that they have been sleeping with the same man they band together and become friends rather than falling into that old trop of competitive womanhood and trying to “steal” him from each other. However this is not terribly original as this also neatly sums up the plot of John Tucker Must Die, a teenage movie where they do a lot of the same things as this one.
Linda Holmes at NPR calls The Other Woman “a terrible movie that has happened to funny actresses” and it is hard not agree. I think what annoys me most about The Other Woman is what it could have been. I was hoping that this was going to be a funny female-driven comedy that is fundamentally about friendship, something akin to Bridesmaids or The Heat, or maybe even Mean Girls. Sadly that was not to be the case. Instead what we have is a movie that presents us with a tired pseudo “Girl Power!” line and expects us to swallow it hook line and sinker. Many times the movie presents us with tropes about female friendship and then pretends like it is subverting them in a clever way. But it doesn’t. Instead we have a movie about female friendship that is all about talking about a man (again) and involves shaming him by trying bring question to his masculinity (again), while simultaneously throwing women of colour under the bus (again).
How does the film throw women of colour under the bus you ask? Well firstly, we are, as so often happens in film and television, treated to a hilariously white-washed version of New York City. I’m pretty sure even all the extras are white. The only person of colour who speaks is Nicki Minaj, who plays assistant to Cameron Diaz’s high powered lawyer character Carly. Fortunately unlike Jennifer Hudson’s character in the first Sex and the City movie, her role isn’t to teach Carly about love and show her the error of her ways with her earthy Blackness and down home wisdom. She mostly wears killer outfits and provides sardonic commentary in a New York accent.
Secondly, there is a pivotal-to-the-plot scene where Carly has lunch with her father to ask him what he would do if he wanted to hide money. This makes no sense as Carly is a lawyer for a large New York City firm so it seems likely she would know what people do with their money if they are trying to hide it. Even worse, however, is that this scene takes place in a bar/restaurant called No Hands ,where Asian women massage them and hand feed them. The message is pretty clear: empowerment, even such pale empowerment as this is only for white women.
Overall, the movie toes the line of Sex and the City faux empowerment where everything in a woman’s world centers around a man. Its “LADEEZ ON TOP” message comes heavily watered down by the fact that the movie barely passes the Bechdel test and the conversations not relating to Mark (the cheating husband) are about such thrilling topics as how hot Amber is.
I think part of the problem is that the movie relies heavily on physical comedy rather than clever writing and this is often hit or miss. Some parts are genuinely hilarious but many others fall quite flat. I’m not sure why, because Diaz in particular has certainly proven herself to be a gifted at physical comedy, but many of the gags tend toward feeling too forced and unnatural. This is especially true of Leslie Mann’s batty housewife act.
Despite all of this there is a lot of lovely imagery of women enjoying each other’s company, something that is STILL woefully lacking in the movie world where most big budget movies only have one named woman in them. Some of the best scenes are the ones where you don’t really get to hear any dialogue but just view the women hanging out. The fact that these scenes have no dialogue that we can hear sends the message that the only types of conversations that are worth hearing from women.
I don’t regret going to see The Other Woman because I think it was passably funny and it was really nice to have a movie where women are the stars of the show for a change; but it could have been so much better. The starring women were certainly not used to their full potential and the movie was definitely not as subversive as it pretended to be.