1998 • PG-13 • 1h 44mins • Watch trailer • Rent it • Stream on Hulu
🪄 Magic! Three female-lead movies for spooky season
You’re reading Pizza & a Movie—eating our way through rental classics and their backstories. Tonight we’re in the home stretch of a three-part film festival for your inbox I’m calling Magic! We took on vamps with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then we learned spells with the goth kids in The Craft. Now we’re following the Owens sisters who just want a little love in this dark, dank world. It’s the one that asks, what if witches were hot? We’re popping in Practical Magic.
Here’s the plot. Meet the Owens family. Sisters Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Gillian (Nicole Kidman) live with their aunts Frances (Stockard Channing) and Jet (Dianne Wiest) in a giant Victorian somewhere New England. They also live with a family curse. Owens women fall in love, but their lovers always die way ahead of schedule. Oh, and they’re witches.
Sally is more practical, Gilly more magical. Gillian leaves for LA to party with bad boyfriend Jimmy (Goran Visnjic). Sally stays, falling for a local (Mark Feuerstein) and having a couple kiddos of her own. But the family curse catches up to her—her fella kicks it, sending her spiraling. Gilly, meanwhile, has trouble of her own. Turns out Jimmy has a mean streak. Sally helps her sister escape him, but Jimmy doesn’t survive the goodbyes. A few days later, Jimmy’s mean-spirited spirit still hangs around. Can Gillian ever be truly rid of this dirtbag? And what if someone misses Jimmy and calls the cops? And can Sally find love of her own again?
Novel Magic
Look, this is a bad script. I just made the plot sound straightforward, but it takes a long time to get to those beats. Scenes begin with no clear tie to the prior, ending with no obvious conclusion. Folks say things like, “All I want is a normal life,” which isn’t even a motivation so much as a character verbally synopsizing themselves in case you couldn’t figure them out. The pacing is rough too. Setup takes so long that the movie’s not really going until halfway through its runtime. So why did they want to make it? Why did the likes of Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock say yes to this? Maybe they liked the book.
Just like Jaws, Practical Magic, published on July 1, 1995, was a NYT bestselling novel first. It was the latest from Alice Hoffman who already had ten novels under her belt. Combine that summer debut with a hardback page count of 244 and you’ve got a beach read on your hands, pal. Cosmopolitan called it “a delicious fantasy of witchcraft and love in a world where gardens smell of lemon verbena and happy endings are possible.” Settle down, Cosmo. Anne Rice had just finished up her Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy with Taltos the year before, perhaps leaving a demand vacuum perfect for Practical Magic.
Sophomore director Griffin Dunne picked up where the book left off. It must have been a commercially appealing package. A plot outline, character details, built-in fanbase. But the film version isn’t much like its literary counterpart. Here’s what’s different in the book:
👩👩👧👧 The aunts aren’t so friendly
🏡 They live in the suburbs in the present
🙅♀️ Sally’s daughters aren’t all sweetness and light
💁♀️ The aunts do more for the locals (only hinted at in the movie)
🤬 The sisters aren’t so tight (you kinda wonder why they are in the film)
Stayed for the Vibes
So other than a handful of characters and a few sinews of plot, what do the book and movie have in common? One big thing: Vibes. Feels like I lived a whole lifetime watching Sally and Gillian grow up. The feel of the island town, the ludicrously charming Owens house, the shifting emotional states of the players who—as with real people—don’t have an overly defined center to return to, and the jaunty score that promises all will be well, all of it are vibes I’m happy to sit in for nearly two hours. I’m not alone in that either. In my research I kept finding fans of novel admitting with no shame to preferring the movie over the book. But what they liked about both was the feeling.
The enduring thing about Practical Magic is the on-display emotions involved in complex, long-term relationships. Dunne talked about the story like this: “It was literally like a cauldron. Every emotion, theme and ingredient you could imagine was swirling around in it. I particularly liked the women’s use of magic; it comes right from the title. It’s about a more practical, almost holistic approach that seems like a gift that virtually anyone could have.”
Built from Scratch
It might suffer from a bad script but Practical Magic’s production values only overachieve. With little to go on from the book, Production Designer Robin Standefer and Art Director Steven Alesch magicked up a whole house to shoot in. Well, two, actually. The first was a series of fully decorated sets for spaces like the conservatory and kitchen. All normal soundstage stuff. The second? You’re not gonna believe this. Over an eight-month period, they built the giant house you see in the movie from scratch.
But it gets weirder. As Barbara Streisand found out when she asked to buy the house later, it was just an architectural shell. No real house inside. Just an exterior. Sure, they brought a few key sets all the way from LA to the house on San Juan Island, WA for shooting. But other than that, the insides and the outside were states apart. Stitched together only with Hollywood razzle-dazzle.
They tore down the house after shooting. The lot they built it on was rented. But, if you ask me, they tore down any chance Practical Magic had to make money the moment they chose to get so elaborate. Might be movie magic, but certainly not of the practical variety.
Speaking of magic, they took a leaf out of The Craft’s book and kept an expert on set to advise. In Practical Magic’s case it wasn’t so much out of reverence for the subject matter. Mostly it was because director Dunne didn’t know a spell from a hole in the ground. Which, you know, same girl. But at least he had the good sense to know. Dunne claims supernatural stuff kept happening on-set throughout production, potentially due to the curse his consultant witch said she put on him after he refused to give her a raise. He paid $100 for a real exorcism, figuring it might clear out the curse but would at least be fun to watch. Probably wasn’t wrong.
Practical Magic at the Box Office
What did the movie-goers of ‘98 think of this? Practical Magic opened at #1 on October 16, 1998. In the #2 spot was Bride of Chucky. Magic’s box office take wasn’t anything special, totaling an okay $68M against its $75M price tag. Even without figuring in marketing costs, it didn’t make its money back. I suspect Kidman was expensive. She took a $5M fee for The Peacemaker in ’97 and $6.5M for 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut. By Cold Mountain in ’03 she got $15M per film.
Critics hated it. Roger Ebert opened his review by saying, “Practical Magic is too scary for children and too childish for adults. Who was it made for?” Others panned its plotting, which is slow in the first half before moving in high gear in the back half. I think part of what they didn’t like was that, as far as I can tell, Magic doesn’t conform to the three-act structure of most movies. It’s consistently difficult to tell where you are in the story. Put differently, it’s like watching a novel more than a movie.
Audiences and critics alike didn’t connect with Practical Magic. If a movie’s deal isn’t clear, it probably won’t be commercially successful (especially if it’s expensive). And if it’s not violent/hot/masculine, men won’t like it (sigh). Fortunately, commercial prospects and men aren’t everything. As of writing, Magic has one of those fun wide split scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Critical average? 23%. Audience average? 73%. Tells you a lot of people love this, though not for conventional reasons. It’s another cult classic.
If you haven’t seen Practical Magic, put it on this weekend! It’s a real weekend vibe.
Pizza of the Week
I’ve been making pizza at home every weekend for the last 8 years. Here’s what I made this time.
Cup ’n’ Char Pepperoni: Ezzo Supremo Peps with Mike’s Hot Honey.
A great pepperoni pizza is about the peps. They need to be thin or they won’t cook in the 3-4 minutes the pizza is in the oven for. I buy the best in the biz—Ezzo Supremos—in bulk and keep ‘em in my freezer. They’re the cup and char variety, which bowl up and caramelize around the edges. Can’t beat ‘em. Perfect with a light touch of Brooklyn’s own Mike’s Hot Honey.
That’s Practical Magic in the books, folks. And with it concludes our three-parter, Magic! We covered Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the one you didn’t know existed. And The Craft, the one all the ‘90s kids loved. Now we talked Practical Magic, the one everybody but the bookheads forgot. Hope you enjoyed this series! I loved the break from what my household calls “man movies”.
And, hey, if you liked this one, send it to a pal who would too! They’ll get by if they can learn a little Practical Magic.
NOTES:
Kylie, Sally’s oldest daughter, is played by Evan Rachel Wood of Westworld.
Director Griffin Dunne is the nephew of Joan Didion, a leader of New Journalism and author of Slouching Toward Bethlehem.
Dunne himself starred in An American Werewolf in London (’81). Also a great October watch.
Yes, Barbara Streisand really did call and ask to buy the house after the movie came out. She was sad to hear they’d torn it down.
They invited everyone in Coupeville, WA, a Victorian-era seaside town where in-town scenes were shot, to show up for the final scene. Fun!
During the midnight margaritas scene, all four actors got actually sloshed on bad tequila Nicole Kidman brought. That’s commitment to the craft.
They installed rubber floors for Gilly’s exorcism scene. Kidman hit the decks hard for take after take.