Note: This review is dedicated to Chris Kuhar, who gifted me the DVD for my housewarming/tenure party.
I remember seeing this one on cable back when watching movies on late-night cable was a thing; I vaguely remember being mystified by that closing shot: Roseanne Barr leading a bunch of women through the streets of Manhattan. It had evaporated until I suddenly remembered a happy divorce at the end. I admired the foresight of the filmmakers to see that there could be such a thing, back in 1989.
A brief plot description: Roseanne Barr plays Ruth, a housewife whose accountant husband, Bob, dreams of working for celebrities. And he gets his wish and more when Ruth literally collides with famed novelist Mary Fisher (as far as I know, this was Meryl Streep’s first comic turn). Bob becomes her accountant, and Mary becomes his mistress. Bob leaves and moves in with her; subsequently, Ruth is determined to ruin the four pillars of his life: Home, Family, Career, and Freedom.
I won’t spoil too much, but in her journey, Ruth schemes her way into a position into Mary’s mother’s nursing home, where they conspire to spill some dark secrets about Mary. She meets Hooper, a senior orderly who teams up with her to start an employment agency for women who’ve been subjugated in the name of male oppression (and a couple of those women are divorced and adrift after not working in the name of the patriarchy). And it works out. Mary is presented as a caricature of the childfree woman; she’s hopeless when it comes to taking care of Bob’s kids. But I guess that’s her karma for being dishonest. In the end, Ruth and Bob are divorced, and he has become a better person, offering to cook for the kids when he gets out of prison for some financial misdeeds Ruth helped expose. I thought this might hint at a reconciliation, but I think Ruth’s found enough strength to not go back. And that last shot is beautiful; it reminds me of the powerful women we have in the Community of Single People page and beyond.