The Women opens with a terrible, ugly, meaningless series of shots of ladies' legs walking in shoes. They are in a city! They are click-clacking around! Some are walking their dogs! Some shoes are more expensive than others! This is like the opening credits of a low-budget cable network's show, as if The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd were remade with a negative budget. Perhaps for YouTube! And then things get awfuler.

First, let us return to the source material!

That is page 11 of one-time Vanity Fair managing editor Clare Booth Luce's 1936 play of The Women. In it you will see an explicit and intentional exploration of class, right from the get-go.

In the remake, you will see a series of moneyed women who despise, yes, the perfume counter spritzer girl, and who look far down upon the outer-borough/Jersey/Long Island/whatever-that-was accent of their gossipy manicurist, who informs them about their friend's husband's affair with said spritzer girl.

But Murphy Brown creator Diane English doesn't think her rich bitches are bitches. They are too busy weeping about losing their jobs or having heart-to-hearts with their not-at-all put-upon household staffs. And besides, this remake can only contrive to make one of the women of the film actually have a household staff! (Well two really—the always-pregnant one (Debra Messing, and, ugh) has some sort of nanny but that doesn't get exploited in the slightest for meaning.) Because they live largely alone in a world of money without the slavery trappings of yesteryear (and yes I realize this sounds like a film review in Dissent), there are no class structures for them to bump up against. Instead, there is only the glass ceiling. These women—successful and rich—are the "help" that the original women formerly owned.

And in light of the perfectly class- and object-conscious Sex and the City—a movie that brilliantly addressed New York City the way it is now—this movie takes place nowhere and no-when.

So. Luce's very first assignment at Condé Nast was entitled "What the Well-Dressed Baby Will Wear." (Doesn't that just sound like today!) But she came a long way, baby. She was described as "The Terror of Park Avenue" in the New York Times in 1938, and why was everyone so hateful in her play? A reporter sat down with Luce and her butler, who was named Brace, and found out.

Now, remade in our hand-holding age, it is thick with redemption and tears of forgiveness. When one little Miss Hubris gets her comeuppance near the end, it's only to find herself and to become a better friend. Finding herself!

Meanwhile, the critics don't know what to make of the movie, because the remake is so muddled in gestures of sympathy.

"At bottom, this is less a movie about defending a marriage or battling for a man than it is about the protection of social privilege," wrote A. O. Scott in the New York Times. "And when it comes to issues, The Women plays like a year's worth of stories from a glossy magazine," wrote Kenneth Turan in the LA Times. "Ms. English's strongly feminist take on the material divests the comedy of all its humor," wrote Andrew Sarris in the Observer. (And where are the women reviewing now? Where are Manohla and Carina?)

So it's feminist! No it's antifeminist! It's about privilege! It's not about anything, actually. And it's ugly to look at to boot.