Some delicious, over-the-top scenery chewing by the divine Meryl Streep is the primary reason to check out a bizarre black comedy from 1989 called She-Devil.The film stars Roseanne Barr as Ruth, a frumpy and insecure housewife and mother who is crushed to learn that her accountant/husband, Bob (Ed Begley Jr.) has begun to have an affair with a glamorous romance novelist named Mary Fisher (Streep). When Bob finally decides to leave Ruth, she then sets out on an elaborate plan to exact revenge on her scummy husband, beginning with burning their home to the ground and sending her children to live with Bob and Mary.This film was made during Roseanne's hiatus from the first season of her classic sitcom and was intended to make a movie star out of her, but failed dismally, primarily due to the fact that the character Roseanne plays here is not as smart or appealing as Roseanne Conner and it's hard to get behind a lot of Ruth's actions in this movie. It's a little hard to believe that a wronged wife would actually destroy her children's home merely as a way of getting back at her husband, which is also hard to buy because the character of Bob is really a jerk and why Ruth cares about his feelings or why Mary finds herself attracted to him are a mystery as well, which for me was the primary problem with this story...the character of Bob was just not worth these two women fighting over.Director Susan Seidleman, who scored a bullseye five years earlier with Desperately Seeking Susan really misses here, but she is hampered by a screenplay that is kind of all over the place and some really unlikable characters, especially Barr's Ruth, who is supposed to evoke sympathy from the viewer, but does just the opposite.What this film does have going for it is a perfectly executed comedy turn from the fabulous Meryl Streep, who manages to mine every bit of humor out of her character that the screenplay provides. As for the rest of the cast, Ed Begley Jr. is miscast as Bob and some minor laughs are provided along the way by Sylvia Miles as Mary's mother, who loves to tell anyone who will listen what a loser her daughter is and A Martinez as Mary's manservant/boy toy, but this is Streep's show all the way and without her, this film would be impossible to get through.

I'm not a fan of Roseanne Barr (or whatever she calls herself now), but this movie was a definite misfire. While the casting is awful--Ed Begley Jr. as anybody but a nebbish is simply wrong and Meryl Streep makes you wonder why she won anything related to an award for her acting--the film's overtones are very strange.On the gender side, this movie attempts to make itself into a moralistic feminist play about how women are always mistreated by men. Unfortunately, the character of Ruth negates this by being more manipulative than her husband, especially in regards to using his second mistress to help frame him for fraud. Also, she takes on a very strange attitude towards revenge by attempting to destroy Meryl Streep before going after her husband. While her list notes that her husband is her focus, the movie takes an odd turn by seeking out Meryl's character as a moral lesson while destroying her husband. The film can never really rectify why Ruth hates her husband so much that she's going after the woman who supposedly lured him away. The film's ending takes some satisfaction in changing Mary into a more bitter and 'learned' woman but doesn't really offer a real solution. Is Ruth going after her husband through this woman? And if she blames her husband for this, why is she going to such great lengths to destroy Mary since her husband is simply the kind of jerk who uses and then leaves women? Shouldn't have Ruth found more common ground with Mary after a while? And if one sees this through a class sensibility, Ruth's whole mission becomes pointlessly sadistic. Mary is of a higher-class and is rich to an extent. Ruth is a poor and ugly housewife with limited means. At the end, Ruth raises in class while Mary remains the same. Hence, Ruth could be seen as using her husband's infidelity as a means to rise above her own station. While Ruth's narrative diatribes about Mary 'learning' about being a wife are meant to be seen as some kind of validation for the troubles of a housewife who has to deal with various troubles to keep a family intact, it's hard not to notice that Ruth at the end will not go back to being the very housewife she supports. By rising herself out of revenge, she in fact becomes an image of Mary but causes her whole actions throughout the movie to be negated. Her whole character's motivation hinges on being an abused lower-class housewife who is going to knock down the higher-class woman down for stealing her man and at the end becomes exactly the same: successful in her own right. This is hypocrisy at its finest. And the dumping of her own children as some sort of object on their father completes the hypocrisy. The image of a housewife is something to be shown on a pedestal, but isn't recommended for a way of living. While this could mirror the life of Roseanne, it simply does not fit. How can you support a woman who is supposed to be an everyday woman (as the conceit goes) fighting for a sense of justice when she turns out to be the same as the woman who stole her man? This whole angle of thinking is what sinks the movie. Are we seeing revenge for Ruth, or are we seeing her fight back over the loss of property in the form of a husband which she doesn't want back anyway? And the movie cannot resolve this because then we get into weighty issues about what being a housewife truly is. By marketing itself as some sort of comical Lifetime Movie of the Week, the movie supports a position as the housewife/mother being some sort of holy figure to be supported and idealized. But with the ending showcasing a housewife 'evolved' into a businesswoman who joins the kids she abandoned as a part of her revenge to the husband she doesn't want back, this negates the whole plot. Why didn't she just dump her kids on the husband and forget about them all? The point of the revenge was to assuage her ego, which then marks the housewife/mother/Jesus figure as some sort of prison which one must escape since it was formed by a man. But since without the man this illusion breaks down, the movie instead becomes the story of a woman who seeks to better herself after a horrible betrayal and instead dwells in the past for petty revenge, hence sinking her moral high ground for absolutely nothing.

This movie takes some well-deserved licks. I'm sympathetic to the theme (and deriving comedy from it) but this is just a misfire. For starters in answer to the question everyone was asking when this came out.. No Meryl Streep cannot do comedy. I can't imagine she's ever told a joke.Part of her problem is that as a self-impressed diva, she can't bear to fit herself into the scale of a movie. She's too freaking needy for that. Her self-conscious technique continually takes you out of the world of her movies, and standing amidst the ruins, all that's left for dazed viewers is to fawn appreciatively over her "ability." Apparently this trick got old for her too, and in an effort to develop some range, she began to choose absurdly inappropriate material that only further proved she had no versatility; this, Death Becomes Her, The River Wild. Can she do comedy? No, but she can't do adventure either.On the Actors studio when James Lipton asked what her least favorite word was, Streep sneered "edgy!" Perhaps this is because in her whole career she has only mastered "earnest." She couldn't do edgy if she was holding Lee Strasberg at gunpoint. She's too cerebral. She botches everything but drama.In an effort to say something nice about her, she was good in both Fred Schepisi films twenty years ago; Plenty and A Cry in the Dark.

This movie was made early on in Roseanne's TV career. The movie character of "Ruth" is not far off from her TV character, i.e. overweight, frumpy, but the movie has a far different plot from her cohesive, despite dysfunctional TV family. In the movie version, she is a doting yet overwhelmed housewife, devoted to her husband, until her cheats on her and subsequently leave her and the kids for a more promising life with a romance novelist.I think this movie has been given a bum-rap by critics. Roseanne is funny, the supporting cast is good, and Meryl Streep is her usual excellent self.This movie is a good one for a rainy day. Highly watchable, hard to fault. Those that expect perfection from any movie with a plot such as this are overreaching.