She-Devil movie review & film summary (1989)

There's a delicious element of sweet revenge in Barr's entire career. Here is the woman who proves, for all of us, that we could be TV stars and stand-up comics, if only we got a couple of breaks, because we've sure got more on the ball than the morons who are making it in show biz. And that sense of realized revenge is an undercurrent throughout "She-Devil," which works both on a fictional level and as a real-life demonstration that Barr and Streep are indeed right there in the same movie.

If Barr is correctly cast, so is Streep, who has always had a rich vein of comedy bubbling through her personal life - few people are merrier during interviews - but who has dedicated her career to playing serious or even tragic women, most of them with accents. Here she's given a juicy role to sink her teeth into: Mary Fisher, the best-selling romance novelist who seems like what would happen if the genes of Barbara Cartland, Jackie Collins and Danielle Steel were combined in the same trash compactor. It's a role that calls out for broad, fearless interpretation, and Streep has a lot of fun with it.

Barr's character is named Ruth, and she's a fat, plain suburban housewife with a mole on her upper lip that looks like a surgically implanted raisin. She is married, none too securely, to an accountant named Bob (Ed Begley Jr.), who dreams of moving up in the ranks of his profession by becoming an accountant to the stars. Fate grants his wish. He meets Mary Fisher during an incident involving a spilled drink at a charity benefit, and one thing leads to another so rapidly that he cruelly drops off his wife at home before ending up in bed with the lustful novelist.

The heart of the movie involves the revenge that Ruth takes out on her husband and Mary Fisher - revenge so thorough and methodical that she even takes time to jot down the areas of her husband's life she wants to destroy: first, his home; then his family, career and freedom, in that order. Bob has accused her of being a she-devil, and she is more than willing to play the role. She will haunt the faithless bastard until he wishes he had never heard of accounting, much less of Mary Fisher.

"She-Devil" was directed by Susan Seidelman, whose credits include "Desperately Seeking Susan," the underrated "Making Mr. Right" and the recent "Cookie." She has a sure touch for off-center humor, the kind that works not because of setups and punch lines, but because of the screwy logic her characters bring to their dilemmas. In the middle passages of this movie, she goes for broad comic strokes, especially in the way she portrays the gauche lifestyle of Mary Fisher, whose home looks like a Holiday Inn's wet dream. Streep, as Mary Fisher, has erected a glamorous fictional facade around the mundane actual facts of her life, and it is with grim precision that Barr's character pulls it to pieces.