Monday, June 2, 2008
There are some moments in your life that as they happen, you know years later, you’ll be able to recount every last detail. And then there are moments where try as you might, you’ll never remember more than the broadstrokes. And then, there are the rarest of moments where, years later, the individual pieces will mean nothing because all you’ll ever need to remember about that place in time was the way you felt.
From the very first chime of the familiar tune, burned so pointedly in our minds, a genuine applause erupted in the theater filled with women, young, old, single, married and everything in between. We had all purchased our tickets days in advance, we’d all stood in the 40 minute line outside the theater to get choice seats. And we’d all donned our best heels and purses, kissed our men and kids goodbye and settled in to welcome back our four friends.
Charlotte, Miranda, Samantha and of course Carrie proved to us that they were worth the wait.
It was everything I expected it to be, both good and bad. And there were a few surprises along the way. The biggest came with the 2:20 minute running time. The second was, they’d found a way to take a forty minutes show, triple it and still make me want to stay and watch the credits.
Sex & The City: The Movie, picks up three years after the shows conclusion, with Carrie, the consummate heroin, blissfully in love with a man we now know as John James Preston but whom will forever be Mr. Big. Miranda is still in Brooklyn, but we find her simply coasting along in a ghastly sinking marriage to bar owner Steve. Charlotte, whom admittedly, has always gotten the short end of the character development stick, has settled nicely into motherhood with her adopted Chinese daughter and is very much in love with her Jewish, divorce attorney husband Harry. And then there’s Samantha…Whom much to my surprise is living in LA with her now TV star boyfriend, Smith.
I’m not going to lie to you, perfect it ain’t. There are plot issues galore (Samantha’s journey is never set up well enough to make her payoff mean anything to us), and the pacing of the too long first act just reminds us that Michael Patrick King (the shows EP and the movie’s writer/director) should stick to half-hours and 60 minute dramas. But problems aside, it was in short, the movie we’d all come to see.
An emotional roller coaster from the very first scene, I laughed at all the right moments, like Charlottes Mexican mishap. I tinged when careless statements like Miranda’s regrettable, “Let’s just get it over with?” were thrown out there. And when Big does the (predictable, yet) unthinkable, I along with every other woman, and gay man, in the theater, held my breath, both equally as angry as I was hurt.
Still I’d have to say the biggest surprise for me wasn’t the inclusion of Louise, Carrie’s new assistant and SATC’s only major Black female character; but rather that Jennifer Hudson played her so comfortably that she felt as though she’d been there all along.
And then of course there were the clothes.
If there was ever a sixth woman in the group (I’ll get to the fifth in a second), it was and still very much is the incomparable Patricia Fields. This movie was so flawlessly styled that even in Carrie’s darkest moments, with greasy hair and not a stitch of make-up in sight, even her old tattered pj’s looked fierce. I’m still a little shaky on what exactly took place while she and Miranda shopped for Halloween costumes due to the breathtakingly fabulous black leather and fur coat hugging Carrie’s body.
But about that fifth lady…My biggest problem with this movie was that with the exception of a few street scenes, one on New Years eve, I felt we didn’t get enough time with the city that has nurtured these girls into the women we loved. Where were the bars, clubs and restaurants that had made our show the consummate name dropper? And where oh where was Carrie’s moment with the place she once defended to an out of town sailor, warning, “Nobody messes with my boyfriend.”
As I watched this movie I’d waited so long for, I looked around the theater and saw familiar expressions on the faces of the women around me. Cards up: I missed Sex & the City because while everyone speculated openly about which woman represented her, the truth is, there are pieces of each of these ladies in everyone of us. And this show, this silly little show with such a catchy title allowed us to see ourselves in third person, frankly, flawed and fabulously.
The truth is Charlotte, Miranda, Samantha and Carrie allowed us to feel ok about some of the things we as women deal with everyday. From the mundane like getting a Brazilian for the first time, to the devastating, like our mothers dying, to that which is so vulnerable that we dare not speak it aloud, like some of us are still madly in love with men who broke our hearts: with each dilemma, each pep talk and each breakfast, they made us feel like we weren’t the only ones. And tonight, four years later, these seven women (including J. Hud, the fabulous Pat and of course the beautiful Big Apple) proved to us, they still got it. And that was the sex we really needed.
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