This autumn perennial remains bewitching.
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman have never exactly stopped being stars, but it’s hard to overstate just how much of a supernova they could each be in their white-hot run during the ’90s. However, the prospect of their uniting to play sisters in a sumptuous adaptation of Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel Practical Magic couldn’t turn the fantastical melodrama into a hit when it reached theaters. Director Griffin Dunne’s film was a financial disappointment, but garnered a loyal audience after hitting home video, and has become a near-legendary cult classic with a big enough following that WB is rolling the dice on a follow-up.
Now we also have a shiny new 4K release to celebrate the return of the Owens sisters, and they’ve never looked better.
Practical Magic charts the beginning and (apparent) ending of a deadly curse that’s followed the Owens family for centuries. Initially inflicted upon herself by Maria Owens after she’s accused of witchcraft in 17th century Massachusetts, and accidentally passed down through generations ensuring that any man who loves an Owens woman meets an untimely death. When their father dies in a tragic accident and their mother succumbs to a broken heart, sisters Sally and Gillian go to live with their aunts Francis (Stockard Channing) and Bridget “Jet” (Dianne Wiest) Owens. Both girls have inherited the family talent for actual magic, and while the aunts are loving instructors in the craft, the townspeople share the prejudice that led early colonists to try to hang the girls’ ancestor. Needless to say, seeing their aunts do magic for the parents of the very children who threw rocks at them and ridiculed them for being witches leaves both girls with complicated feelings on the subject.
As Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Gilly (Nicole Kidman) grow into adulthood, they deal with their gifts and the world’s attitude towards powerful women in different ways. Sally wants to leave magic largely in the rearview and live a quiet normal life, her most serious magical working a child’s spell trying to summon an impossible partner so that she never falls in love. Gilly jets off to California with a boyfriend to leave behind hometown prejudices, but not before the girls swear a blood oath to always be in each other’s lives.
Sally’s plans to never fall in love don’t last long when she meets Michael (Mark Feuerstein), but after a few years of domestic bliss, the Owens curse leaves Michael dead and Sally a wreck. Her resentment of the family burden curdles with memories of how the town treated her and her sister resulting in her swearing that her children will never learn magic. Bullock is tasked with a lot in this film, not only in playing a single character across more than a decade from teenager to grieving widow, but also in anchoring the movie as both the “serious” sister of the pair as well as necessary exposition and selling a good deal of the fantastical to the audience.
Gillian doesn’t have much better luck with romance when she starts dating Jimmy Angelov (Goran Visnjic), who ends up being far more possessive, moody, and increasingly resilient to the belladonna Gilly slips into his liquor to get some occasional time away from him. Never a good sign for long-term relationships when you have to drug your significant other.
When Jimmy’s “eccentricities” turn frighteningly violent, Gilly reaches out to Sally for help, and before long the sisters are dealing with a corpse that won’t quite stay dead and a distractingly attractive lawman looking for a missing Mr. Angelov. One of the reasons this film has endured past its initial dismissal on release is how well Bullock and Kidman play off of each other as wildly different sisters who will nevertheless walk through fire for one another at a moment’s notice. There’s a delicate balance that on-screen sibling relationships have to strike between good-natured bickering, devotion, genuine rivalry, and juggling audience sympathies, but the bond between Sally and Gilly is iconic for a reason.
The actors are also electric to watch together just from a pure movie star perspective. Kidman walks the line between town “Bad Girl” and a woman who’s been running away from the box the town would shove her into, and does a great job hiding Gilly’s desperation behind a cigarette and a sharp remark. While a generational wait between sequels has become almost standard, it’s mildly shocking there wasn’t a slew of projects teaming Bullock and Kidman following how winning they are together in this.
Sally’s budding romance with Investigator Gary Hallet (Aidan Quinn) could have easily been overshadowed by the Owens sisterhood, but there are enough wrinkles in their meet-cute – and Quinn has the requisite quietly smoldering charisma – that it feels solidly fleshed out. Not only does Sally find herself unable to lie to Officer Hallet (a distinct disadvantage when you’re hiding bodies in the backyard), but Gary also starts demonstrating traits eerily reminiscent of the list of impossible traits she included in her love spell as a child, ensuring that Sally will have to reckon with her past in more ways than one even as she tries to save her sister.
At a svelte 104 minutes, Practical Magic is fairly stuffed even before it turns into a young romantic’s first exorcism movie. However, it does a fairly graceful job of weaving its story across decades (or centuries, if you include Maria’s curse) while still building to the ultimate test of the Owens family. The movie will make clever use of montage or dissolve to rush through years only to stop for a key scene on the way to the plot hitting the fan in the back half, and brings back a few buried story and character elements for truly emotional payoff for the finale. It’s impossible to know which of the three credited screenwriters was responsible for what, but anyone familiar with Robin Swicord (Little Women 1994 and Matilda in 1996, as well as Memoirs of a Geisha and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) will likely sense her pen here more than once.
There’s also a lot of this film that gets by on “cozy autumnal vibes” in between the shifts into slightly spooky territory. The way cinematographer Andrew Dunn fills the wide anamorphic frame and uses deep shadows and candlelight to contrast the vivid colors and hazy sunlight make the film’s tonal shifts feel like part of a deep and mystical world rather than constant tonal whiplash. The Alan Silvestri score hits the perfect balance between whimsy and melancholy, and the soundtrack shuffles between heavyweights like Marvin Gaye, Sheryl Crowe, Stevie Nicks, and Elvis Pressley, creating a very 1990s playlist without becoming too distracting (except for when it’s supposed to be, like when “Coconut” drops).
Practical Magic never soars to the heights of Bullock or Kidman’s best genre work, but it has become undeniably iconic. Even with a sequel on the horizon, there’s never been another movie quite like it, which is understandable given its initial reception; but this makes it feel that much more singular to anyone on the movie’s wavelength. It’s a film that feels like it had to have been a major inspiration for authors of modern urban fantasy and “romantasy” in how it mixes its cinematic brew, and makes for an eminently re-watchable story for the right audience.
Presentation:
Practical Magic‘s 4K release is another showcase for WB’s handling of catalog titles moving to UHD. The film is presented in its original 2:39:1 “scope” aspect ratio, and is presented in HDR10 Dolby Vision, making for an enormous improvement on previous home video releases.
The soft, hazy focus of the movie brings to mind the Smallville segment of Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie, but will also bring out extreme close-ups, shallow focus, and deep blacks that the new 4K transfer captures near immaculately.
The picture retains the grain of the ’90s camera work to retain the film’s texture, and even with the “soft” focus the details still pop through without the image ever feeling scrubbed or flattened. The film suffers from the occasional poorly-dated compositing job or visual effect, but is almost uniformly gorgeous throughout – especially during night time scenes and in the light of flames.
The disc includes both the original theatrical 5.1 surround sound mix as well as a “remastered” Dolby Atmos 7.1 audio track, the former offering a notable improvement in balance while the 5.1 mix is very front-heavy. The release also includes optional subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Bonus Content:
Unfortunately, this is another low-effort release in terms of making-of materials. Nearly all the special features are ported over from the previous DVD release, with a single new retrospective featurette included as a “digital exclusive,” and not included on the physical disc.
- The Power of Practical Magic – (Digital Exclusive retrospective about how the how the film became a generational touchstone)
- Feature Audio Commentary with director Griffin Dunne, producer Denis Di Novi, star Sandra Bullock, and composer Alan Silvestri (Archival feature-length commentary)
- Casting the Spell (Archival featurette featuring the filmmakers and stars reflecting on bringing the film to life)
- Making Magic (Archival behind-the-scenes with cast and crew sharing insights on adapting Alice Hoffman’s novel)
Practical Magic is available on 4K UHD and a Limited Edition 4K Steelbook from Warner Bros. Home Video.
