Well-heeled and Weary

dizzy spell: Nicole Kidman (right) shows Will Ferrell some of her magic.

Nora Ephron's perfect people still find something to get frazzled about.

by Sam Adams

As Mark Twain justly observed, you don't have to eat a whole apple to know it's rotten, but it's considered bad form to walk out on a movie, no matter how unpalatable the pomme. Sometimes, however, the movies walk out on you. There was the excruciating wait when the film broke just as Memento stopped flashing back, and the unscheduled half-hour intermission in Hollow Man — which was just as excruciating, not because we were breathless with anticipation, but because it was clear the movie had no hope of getting better.

Accidents happen, but there's chance, and then there's force majeure. Any doubts that the force guiding the universe is fundamentally benign were settled by the fact that the press screening of Bewitched was twice interrupted by backwards reels, the first of which caused a 40-minute break, the second of which brought the showing to a premature end. There is a God, and he's not fond of Nora Ephron movies.

I say "he" even though in Nora Ephron's world, God is certainly a she, a beautiful, frazzled career woman with adorably messy hair and a perfect life that somehow leaves her lacking. Ephron, whose credits include Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, specializes in the neurotic dissatisfaction of affluent women, the kind who get to the top of the corporate ladder and realize they've forgotten their keys.

In Bewitched, the woman who's got everything is Isabel Bigelow (Nicole Kidman), whose tongue-twisting name fits her scrambled personality. A witch who wants to leave magic behind, much to the chagrin of her warlock-and-proud dad (Michael Caine), Isabel can't help but tug her earlobe — replacing the familiar nose-wiggle — when the going gets tough or the VCR needs programming.

Isabel tells her father she wants to be "normal," which apparently involves moving to Los Angeles and finding an emotionally immature man to fall in love with her. Enter Will Ferrell. As Jack Wyatt, a self-involved movie star whose hemorrhaging career has led him back to the wasteland of TV, Ferrell ought to be the kind of fatuous boob he played to perfection in Anchorman. But in an effort to make Jack likeable (ugh), Ephron trivializes his faults, which amount to no more than harmless perks, like requiring a private copper cappuccino urn (a gag virtually duplicated in the Ferrell vehicle Kicking & Screaming).

Ephron's update of the TV-show plot involves Jack casting Isabel as Samantha to his Darren in the TV pilot that's meant to revive his career, and a reversal of fortunes when it turns out that unknown Isabel goes over better than bratty Jack. What it amounts to is glossy indifference in which the towel display at Bed, Bath and Beyond is more sympathetically lit than the movie's ostensible stars.