Simply A Masterpiece

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The movie version of Fay Wheldon's novel "The Life and Loves of a She- Devil" for the most part misses its marks. You would think a movie with this cast and great source material would be a lot better than it is but it's not. Though a film's failure cannot be blamed on just one thing, for this film, the lion's share belongs to the director, Susan Seidelman. Her direction is flat and unimaginative. She shot "She Devil" like it was a TV movie. It certainly looks like it. There's no spark or liveliness to it. It's point and shoot direction. This is acceptable when the actors and the material are solid but here they are not. As good as Roseanne Barr (or Arnold or whatever last name she was or wasn't using at the time) was on her TV show, here she's as flat as Seidelman's direction and since she's the center of the film, it nearly kills it. I think our sympathies were supposed to rest firmly with Roseanne's character Ruth but since she is presented so negatively, we cannot understand why her husband (or anyone) would have been attracted to her in the first place. She comes across as gross and incompetent. There's nothing at stake when she seeks revenge on Bob for leaving her because neither character feels worth the time.The whole movie would have been forgotten if it had not been for one thing: the unbelievable, incredible, tour-de-force comic performance of Meryl Streep. Every single scene she is in is a comic whopper. When she is on screen, the whole movie suddenly jolts to life. Streep's acting skills often rely on capturing the smallest of nuances and in "She Devil" she nails them perfectly. Her Mary Fisher is a woman addicted to the impossible dream of perfect romance. Every word out of her mouth is whispery affirmation of it. She is so good that we end up rooting for her and worse, feeling sorry for her. Streep's best scene (and they are all good) comes about midway when Bob (now cheating on her) comes home late. Streep, on all fours, wags her fanny as she exclaims she's an artist. Brilliant.

I'm not a fan of Roseanne Barr (or whatever she calls herself now), but this movie was a definite misfire. While the casting is awful--Ed Begley Jr. as anybody but a nebbish is simply wrong and Meryl Streep makes you wonder why she won anything related to an award for her acting--the film's overtones are very strange.On the gender side, this movie attempts to make itself into a moralistic feminist play about how women are always mistreated by men. Unfortunately, the character of Ruth negates this by being more manipulative than her husband, especially in regards to using his second mistress to help frame him for fraud. Also, she takes on a very strange attitude towards revenge by attempting to destroy Meryl Streep before going after her husband. While her list notes that her husband is her focus, the movie takes an odd turn by seeking out Meryl's character as a moral lesson while destroying her husband. The film can never really rectify why Ruth hates her husband so much that she's going after the woman who supposedly lured him away. The film's ending takes some satisfaction in changing Mary into a more bitter and 'learned' woman but doesn't really offer a real solution. Is Ruth going after her husband through this woman? And if she blames her husband for this, why is she going to such great lengths to destroy Mary since her husband is simply the kind of jerk who uses and then leaves women? Shouldn't have Ruth found more common ground with Mary after a while? And if one sees this through a class sensibility, Ruth's whole mission becomes pointlessly sadistic. Mary is of a higher-class and is rich to an extent. Ruth is a poor and ugly housewife with limited means. At the end, Ruth raises in class while Mary remains the same. Hence, Ruth could be seen as using her husband's infidelity as a means to rise above her own station. While Ruth's narrative diatribes about Mary 'learning' about being a wife are meant to be seen as some kind of validation for the troubles of a housewife who has to deal with various troubles to keep a family intact, it's hard not to notice that Ruth at the end will not go back to being the very housewife she supports. By rising herself out of revenge, she in fact becomes an image of Mary but causes her whole actions throughout the movie to be negated. Her whole character's motivation hinges on being an abused lower-class housewife who is going to knock down the higher-class woman down for stealing her man and at the end becomes exactly the same: successful in her own right. This is hypocrisy at its finest. And the dumping of her own children as some sort of object on their father completes the hypocrisy. The image of a housewife is something to be shown on a pedestal, but isn't recommended for a way of living. While this could mirror the life of Roseanne, it simply does not fit. How can you support a woman who is supposed to be an everyday woman (as the conceit goes) fighting for a sense of justice when she turns out to be the same as the woman who stole her man? This whole angle of thinking is what sinks the movie. Are we seeing revenge for Ruth, or are we seeing her fight back over the loss of property in the form of a husband which she doesn't want back anyway? And the movie cannot resolve this because then we get into weighty issues about what being a housewife truly is. By marketing itself as some sort of comical Lifetime Movie of the Week, the movie supports a position as the housewife/mother being some sort of holy figure to be supported and idealized. But with the ending showcasing a housewife 'evolved' into a businesswoman who joins the kids she abandoned as a part of her revenge to the husband she doesn't want back, this negates the whole plot. Why didn't she just dump her kids on the husband and forget about them all? The point of the revenge was to assuage her ego, which then marks the housewife/mother/Jesus figure as some sort of prison which one must escape since it was formed by a man. But since without the man this illusion breaks down, the movie instead becomes the story of a woman who seeks to better herself after a horrible betrayal and instead dwells in the past for petty revenge, hence sinking her moral high ground for absolutely nothing.

This movie takes some well-deserved licks. I'm sympathetic to the theme (and deriving comedy from it) but this is just a misfire. For starters in answer to the question everyone was asking when this came out.. No Meryl Streep cannot do comedy. I can't imagine she's ever told a joke.Part of her problem is that as a self-impressed diva, she can't bear to fit herself into the scale of a movie. She's too freaking needy for that. Her self-conscious technique continually takes you out of the world of her movies, and standing amidst the ruins, all that's left for dazed viewers is to fawn appreciatively over her "ability." Apparently this trick got old for her too, and in an effort to develop some range, she began to choose absurdly inappropriate material that only further proved she had no versatility; this, Death Becomes Her, The River Wild. Can she do comedy? No, but she can't do adventure either.On the Actors studio when James Lipton asked what her least favorite word was, Streep sneered "edgy!" Perhaps this is because in her whole career she has only mastered "earnest." She couldn't do edgy if she was holding Lee Strasberg at gunpoint. She's too cerebral. She botches everything but drama.In an effort to say something nice about her, she was good in both Fred Schepisi films twenty years ago; Plenty and A Cry in the Dark.

In my deep heart of hearts, I knew that this was a bad movie, I mean it wasn't well thought out or that well acted and kind of biased. But Despite that fact, for some odd reason, I really did like this movie. I think because I loved the fact on how real it was, I think a lot of women could relate to Rosanne, either looks wise or their love lives. She was so realistic and heart breaking, but you rooted for her all the way into the end. Even though it was kind of pathetic how she kept on obsessing over her ex, I think a lot of us, men or women, have done that.I also love Meryl Streep, because she reminded me of my step mom. She accepts her new boy's children into her house, but ends up with more than she bargained for. I loved her scene with her agent and how her new book would be a flop, "Your lead male's name is Bob?", "I think Bob is a beautiful name!" and her breaking down was just perfect. The husband got what he deserved and you just kept of rooting for Rosanne. It's a guilty pleasure that more people take it for.6/10