The Incredible Shrinking Woman

The Incredible Shrinking Woman has some pretty respectable credits. It is based on a novel ('The Incredible Shrinking Man' which was filmed in1957) by Richard Matheson, author of 'I Am Legend' which became The Omega Man (1974) and its subsequent incarnations;  Lily Tomlin, Charles Grodin and Ned Beatty head the cast list; and, making his debut feature, Joel Schumacher would go on to build a reasonable C.V. as a mainstream Hollywood director. The combined result however doesn’t amount to much.

A satire of suburban consumerism the premise is that Tomlin’s housewife and mother who lives happily in a sanitized estate with her advertising executive husband (Grodin) one day starts shrinking as a result of a toxic accumulation of chemicals in her everyday life (the movie opens with an ad for a cheese spread with a twelve year shelf life).

Although it aspires to being an excoriation of the fantastic plastic world of modern consumer society of the day the film doesn’t develop its critique in the sustained way that Jacques Tati did with Mon Oncle, Monsieur Hulot (1958) or Barry Levinson ly would do with Toys (1992). The eye-gougingly brightly coloured sets and costumes are a lot of fun and there is the occasional good line and visual gag but a lot of it is shrill and as progresses it tends to fall back on televisual standard slapstick inanity.

For all that, working from a script written by her life partner, Jane Wagner, Tomlin is quite entertaining (she also appears as a handful of characters she developed on the hit Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In television show including Ernestine the telephone operator) and particularly given that the film was made before there was CGI, her shrinking is impressively well-handled. Unfortunately Grodin doesn’t get much to do although Beatty is effective in his similarly small part,

Surprisingly (or perhaps not) the film was a box office hit but there is little here that would now appeal to anyone but the most indulgent.

 

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