She-Devil promises mayhem but only delivers mischief. This is an R-rated revenge comedy that doesn’t quite eviscerate the vanity of its targets, but it’s barbed enough that it occasionally nicks an artery.
Its premise is pulp gold. Ruth (Roseanne Barr) is a dumped and duly humiliated housewife. Her longtime husband (Ed Begley Jr.) decides to jump ship and shack up with comically vain romance novelist Mary Fisher (Meryl Streep). So Ruth does only what an ugly and vindictive housewife can: set out to ruin the lives of everyone who wronged her.
Chief among them is Mary—perfumed, privileged, and terminally pleased with herself. She lives in a bubblegum palace that looks like a Barbie Dreamhouse crossed with an erotic retreat. She writes her steamy novels with a billowy feathered quill, her posture alone screaming self-importance. She deserves what she gets. And whatever Mary happens to lob at her ex, he’s earned it twice over—just for being the sort of man who’d fall for Mary in the first place.
But what follows is strangely muted. We expect something evil. Truly vindictive. Not just one or two things, but an entire rampage. Instead, Ruth’s payback leans bureaucratic. She’s not poisoning, stalking, or seducing. She aims more for strategic delegitimization—an IRS audit here, a sabotage of social standing there. These are things the characters deserve anyway, so who really needs Ruth? Movies already tend to work these kinds of imbalances out through karma.
While there are enough guffaws to keep me entertained, the satire is too soft. For a film that calls itself She-Devil, it could use quite a bit more brimstone. The most compelling reason to watch this is Streep. She’s a riot—the first time audiences saw her step outside the Serious Actress mold, and she does it with glee. She glides, preens, unravels. Every vowel sounds dipped in frosting, and each of her gestures seems too elegant to trust. After years of perfecting accents, she finally got to invent one of her own. She devours it whole.
Barr is fine but merely serviceable, playing Ruth with a kind of grim inertia. Her problem is that she tends to flatten scenes that might otherwise have been singing. Perhaps if Barr had been allowed (or had the gumption) to go truly unhinged, it might not have seemed so much like the film was holding back.
While it has its moments—odd little pockets of absurdity and social commentary—it underachieves as a revenge comedy. But as a vehicle for Streep’s barbed comic reinvention, it definitely has its own kind of perverse appeal.