Much has changed in the universe, cosmic and otherwise, since the Owens witches last graced the big screen with their practical magic of sleeping draughts, midnight margaritas and generational love curses. For one, movies like the 1998 cult-ish classic Practical Magic – a compellingly bizarre mashup of genres, aspirational 90s fashion and sisterly affection starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman in their movie-star primes as lovelorn sorceresses in Puritan-lite Massachusetts – largely stopped reaching theaters. For another, nostalgia cycles only intensified and tightened, our algorithms clogged with unsolicited sequels and dupes for Bullock’s impeccable vintage 90s Levi’s.
Which makes Practical Magic 2, reuniting both Kidman and Bullock, and Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest as their lovingly eccentric aunts, somewhat of an anomaly, at once a seeming inevitability and, as a matrilineal romance comedy (though decidedly not a romcom) starring two 60-year-old women, an oddity. There’s no circumventing nostalgia bait, but Practical Magic remains so idiosyncratic in tone and, well, kookiness, that a sequel somewhat appeals.
The new film, directed by Susanne Bier from a script by original co-screenwriter Akiva Goldsman alongside Georgia Pritchett and Kelly Marcel (and again based on a book by Alice Hoffman), doubles down on the distillable ingredients of the original – hairpin tonal turns; strange CGI flourishes; needle drops by Stevie Nicks, that patron saint of witchy white women – though perhaps to a fault. Once again, Bullock’s Sally, the older and more neurotic/sensible of the central sisters, has given up practicing magic, much to the chagrin of Kidman’s looser, airier Gilly. Though she ended the first film believing that she broke the centuries-long curse that every man an Owens woman loved was doomed to die, life offered no such happy endings; her second husband, played in the original by Aidan Quinn, lasted only a few years, prompting her to supernaturally erase any memories of magic from her daughters’ minds, lest they too knowingly love a man to death.
This requires a little magical fudging of the timeline: though the original took place in March 1998– so says Quinn’s investigator Gary Hallet when interviewing Sally for the suspected murder of Gilly’s serial killer ex (it’s kooky!) – new headstones place the events in early 2000s. That’s all the better for Kidman and Bullock, both older now than Channing and Wiest were in the original but with fewer laugh lines, to hover somewhere in the uncanny valley of Hollywood middle age and keep Kylie (Joey King) and Antonia (Maisie Williams), who should be in their mid-30s, in the young 20s heyday of first real love. (Sorry to the recast Evan Rachel Wood and Alexandra Artrip.)
This will prove irksome if you, like me, are timeline-sensitive, but the original’s playful sense of tone, logic and rules in general was admittedly central to its appeal. I find it endearing that the magic in the Practical Magic franchise allows for generational curses, purgatorial spirits and the automatic stirring of coffee cups but not, say, levitating suitcases upstairs, forcing poor Kidman to lug oversized bags through three separate scenes.
So it goes – though Gilly obliquely warns Kylie that “love is our undoing” with “heartbreak feels good in a place like this” camp sincerity (complimentary), Kylie goes on loving anyway. And when her doting college boyfriend Gideon (Xolo Maridueña) ends up cursed in a coma, she, like her mother before her, tearfully rages against the powers that be and, guided by a recently unearthed Book of the Raven, flees to the Owens’ ancestral homeland of England. Sally and Gilly, whose old-pro sparring could sustain a lesser sequel, chase after her, leaving poor Williams and Channing – by far the film’s most luminous screen presence – stranded at the hospital in Boston. A shame, as I would love Aunt Fran’s take on the men they meet abroad, a fascinating dichotomy of masculinity in the hetero-pessimist age: one, an occult professor played by 6ft 5in internet boyfriend Lee Pace, openly pines for Sally, encouraging her to feel her feelings and embrace her power while covered in tattoos; the other, a brooding warlock with a mask of affability (Solly McLeod), craves Kylie’s power, seething with a resonant, almost too pointed sense of aggrieved entitlement.
The plot beats, guiding all the women through said men back to both magic and each other, are characteristically odd and mostly beside the point; if you’re watching the Practical Magic sequel, it is probably to see Kidman and Bullock channel their unique movie-star sorcery – beguiling eccentricity and earthy exasperation, both singularly endearing in their primes – and they conjure it with muscle memory that is fascinating in its own right.
Still, there is some comfort in the Owens’ narrative circularity; in the occult realm, as in the real one, we never truly escape our inheritances nor ourselves, even as times (and men, and hair) change. The overarching, if occasionally overwritten (“no magic is stronger than sisterhood”), theme of feminine solidarity through cyclical adversity is winning enough. The midnight margarita redux may feel obligatory, but there’s just enough magic here to still, despite everything, cast a peculiar spell.
Practical Magic 2 is out in US and Australian cinemas on 10 September and in the UK on 11 September
