Before you press play
Watch if
You want an autumn comfort watch with a beautiful house, four good actresses and no particular need for the plot to hold together.
Wait if
You want expansive fantasy or a system of witchcraft with defined rules. This is a family melodrama whose magic stays deliberately domestic.
Practical Magic opened at number one in October 1998, got poor reviews, and then spent nearly twenty-eight years turning into the film people put on every autumn. The sequel begins its international rollout on 9 September and opens in North America on 10 September, with Susanne Bier directing and Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest returning. So a lot of people are about to rewatch it. It is a pleasant, good-looking film that casts a great many spells and makes very few of them feel magical.
What Practical Magic is actually about
Take the curse out and what is left is a film about two women a small town has decided to be frightened of. Sally Owens (Sandra Bullock) and her sister Gillian (Nicole Kidman) are raised by their aunts in the house the town keeps at a wary distance, mocked at school, and grow into the sort of women other women talk about. The town uses witch as a slur, even though the inheritance underneath the accusation is real, and Practical Magic is at its sharpest when it holds both at once.
The second subject is harder, and the film handles it with real care. Gillian ends up with a man who hurts her, the sisters deal with him between them, and the film makes them carry it afterwards rather than play it as a caper. That was an unusual thing for a studio comedy to attempt in 1998, and not by accident. Griffin Dunne's sister Dominique was murdered by her former boyfriend. He has said the witchcraft was not what drew him, and that the more real he made the violence, the stronger the film's mystical scenes became.
How Practical Magic stages its magic
The spells are all there. Young Sally (Camilla Belle) casts the Amas Veritas spell using a list of impossible qualities, the aunts work their kitchen magic, and the resurrection later gets a spellbook, sage, wheat straw, needles and an invocation to Hecate. What it rarely does is make any of it feel like an event. A spell here is staged like housework, and the camera gives a resurrection about the attention it gives a batch of margaritas.
The costs are real, which makes the flatness stranger. Maria Owens (Caprice Benedetti) casts a spell to protect herself from heartbreak and it curdles into a curse on every man who loves an Owens woman. The resurrection brings Jimmy back wrong. The aunts quietly work a love spell on Sally, and finding out later deepens a distrust of their magic and their meddling she already had. All of it lands as plot rather than pressure, arriving when the story needs it instead of building underneath.
It is tempting to blame 1998. It would be wrong. The year was not short of spectacle and the money was there. When the film does slow down it is lovely: Sally leans over a row of candles, breathes out, and they light, in front of the daughters she has sworn will never be taught any of this. One shot, no explanation, and it tells you more about her than the plot manages in an hour.
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the Owens sisters
Sandra Bullock is fine here. Two years before Miss Congeniality made fuller use of her comic timing, she plays Sally as a guarded woman keeping chaos at arm's length. It is competent, slightly recessive, and she would do far better later.
Nicole Kidman has the flashier half and looks the part completely. The trouble is that Gillian's wildness is described rather than performed. She dances at a pool party inside a loose ring of men, everyone spaced so carefully that the wildness is staged rather than felt. She is much better when the film lets her be funny, and her flirting with Gary Hallet (Aidan Quinn) has a mischief the seduction never finds.
American Horror Story: Coven runs some of the same tricks, tight faces, odd angles, women standing in circles, and gets somewhere this film does not, because its cast plays as though the witchcraft is real to them. Nobody here quite believes it, and the bond that is supposed to be the centre stays a stated fact. The exception is midnight margaritas, four women dancing around a kitchen, which is the sequence everyone remembers and shows what the rest of it lacks.
Scale, sets and camera work
The Owens house is the best thing in the frame and the film knows it. It is also a trick: the exterior was a shell built on San Juan Island and pulled down after the shoot, and the interiors were shot on stages at the Warner Bros. lot. The split shows. Almost everything happens indoors, and the film feels boxed in before the plot does.
The camera does not help. There is a lot of close work at odd angles, atmosphere the first time and cover by the fifth, and the interiors are lit so low that faces stop carrying anything. In the scenes where the sisters are meant to be feeling something, there is not enough of them visible to tell.
Some of that mess is on the record. Michael Nyman wrote a score for this film and it was thrown out for an Alan Silvestri replacement shortly before release, and Griffin Dunne has said the studio softened his rougher material and told him to stick to one tone. He did not, and the film never settles into one register.
Two and a half out of five, dimmed. It is watchable, it looks good, it is funnier than its reputation for tonal chaos suggests, and the argument underneath is better than the film built on it. There are worse ways to spend 104 minutes in October, and it is easy to see why it lasted. If the sequel wants to be the better film, it does not need more feeling.
It needs to make the magic matter.
The belladonna. Sally Owens (Sandra Bullock) doses Jimmy Angelov (Goran Visnjic) to get her sister out of his car and kills him instead. The panic afterwards is played for comedy and the death is played for almost nothing, which is the first clear sign the film will not hold a tone longer than a scene.
The resurrection. For once the film shows the ritual in full: the spellbook, the sage, the wheat straw, the needles, the invocation to Hecate. Then it hurries straight on. The most consequential thing the sisters ever do becomes another tonal pivot before it has had time to frighten anyone.
What comes back. He returns worse, goes for Gillian Owens (Nicole Kidman), and Sally kills him a second time. For about ten minutes the film is honest about what he is, and it is one of the few stretches where the horror is doing more than decorating.
The possession. Then it takes the woman who has just survived him and makes her his vehicle. That is a bleak thing to do to Gillian and the film never really reckons with it, though it does at least stop pretending the sisters can fix this on their own.
The coven. Sally calls the town's women and they come, some out of solidarity and some for a look at the witches, and the film lets both be true. They mix the banishing, take up brooms and work a real ritual. What gives the scene its force is not the ritual, though. It is that they turned up at all, and that the sisters close it by joining blood.
The ending. Sally tells Gary Hallet (Aidan Quinn) that whatever he feels is her childhood spell talking rather than love, and he answers that a curse only works on someone who believes in it. It is the sharpest exchange in the film and the one moment the script argues with itself. The romance around it still has not earned the ending. The town's change of heart has.
Bright Bulbs
- Frances and Jet (Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest) make the house feel lived in and get the best lines without ever pushing for them.
- The town's careful, appalled politeness around the Owens women is a running joke the film never overplays.
- Gillian Owens (Nicole Kidman) looks the part completely, and the costume and hair do more for the character than the script does.
- The horror elements are used as texture rather than for scares, which was an unusual call in 1998 and mostly a good one.
- The town's fear of the Owens women is about their difference as much as their magic, and the film is not coy about saying so.
Dull Bulbs
- Sally Owens (Sandra Bullock) is fine and not much more. The part asks very little of her and gets exactly that.
- The romance with Gary Hallet (Aidan Quinn) is pleasant and weightless. Two people decide they are in love and the film moves on.
Shattered Bulbs
- The spells have serious consequences, but the act of casting them rarely feels dangerous or momentous.
- Two of the decade's biggest stars spend most of the film in rooms too dark to act in.
- The tone resets every few scenes. Comedy, then abuse, then police procedural, then romance, with little holding them together.
Cast
- Sandra Bullock as Sally Owens
- Nicole Kidman as Gillian Owens
- Stockard Channing as Frances Owens
- Dianne Wiest as Bridget “Jet” Owens
- Aidan Quinn as Gary Hallet
- Goran Visnjic as Jimmy Angelov
- Evan Rachel Wood as Kylie Owens
- Alexandra Artrip as Antonia Owens
- Mark Feuerstein as Michael
- Camilla Belle as Young Sally Owens
- Caprice Benedetti as Maria Owens