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YMMV / The First Wives Club

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  • And You Thought It Would Fail: Bette Midler recalled that just before the movie opened, she was told it would not do very well because this movie was competing against action movies with male stars such as Bruce Willis. This movie opened at number one and out-grossed those action movies.
  • Awesome Music:
    • "You Don't Own Me".
    • Billy Porter's version of "Love Is On The Way" is a beautiful and heartbreaking ballad available on the film's soundtrack.
  • Designated Villain: Phoebe, Bill's mistress. Unlike the other mistresses, she didn't have any ill will towards Elise and genuinely idolized her, even coming to her career-resurrecting play to enthusiastically cheer her on.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • The author of the novel, Olivia Goldsmith, died during a plastic surgery procedure. She died from the youth-loving and beauty-obsessed culture that she critiqued. Elise's plastic surgeries start looking more acute in hindsight.
    • One of the husbands ends up with a mistress that turns out to be underage and he's horrified as he had no prior knowledge of her real age. Nearly twenty years later in real life, Stephen Collins, who played one of the other husbands, admitted to willingly molesting children decades prior.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Aside from the fact that forty-something isn't considered that old these days, the cougar/MILF phenomenon of the 2000s and beyond means that nowadays, the older women would be considered just as sexy and desirable as the younger ones, if not more so.
    • Annie's matter-of-fact style of narration very strongly resembles the way Carrie Bradshaw narrates her life in Sex and the City. Sarah Jessica Parker herself has a role in the film as Shelley.
  • Hollywood Pudgy: Brenda obsesses over her weight in several scenes and is taunted about it by her ex's new girlfriend when she couldn't be any more than a size 10 or 12. It's particularly glaring in one scene where's she's thrilled at finally losing some weight, yet looks precisely as she has throughout the movie.
    • She has a photo on the fridge of her being much pudgier. By the time the movie starts, though, she is currently losing weight and at least has made some progress in regaining a healthier weight.
    • She is seen wearing much baggier clothing near the beginning of the movie, seemingly trying to hide it.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Elise may be narcissistic, but it's hard not to feel bad for her for several reasons; her husband cheats on her with a younger woman (who thankfully does admire Elise as an actress, and isn't spiteful like the other two "younger women" in the film), she loses one of her oldest friends to suicide, and she's starting to face ageism in Hollywood.
  • Memetic Mutation: "I beat Meryl!" When Jennifer Lawrence quoted this after winning a Golden Globe over Meryl Streep, some people (including Lindsay Lohan) thought she was insulting the other actress; she had to explain the joke on a late-night show. This is especially funny since Goldie Hawn had previously starred with Meryl in Death Becomes Her.
  • Retroactive Recognition:
  • Tear Jerker:
    • Cynthia's suicide. Before jumping off that balcony, she gazes at her college photo clearly missing those happy years of her life, when she was an ambitious straight-A student who didn't know yet what life had in store for her.
    • Elise learning about Cynthia's suicide from a newspaper. She was before introduced as a self-centred White-Dwarf Starlet but that time she looks genuinely distraught. What's worse, another article next to the headline about Cynthia was about a nine-year-old boy who was hit by a car and clinging to life, and even worse, we never learn about his fate.
    • The very premise of the film is quite sad - four women once best friends in college end up parting ways as they take different roads and meeting again only when one of them commits suicide out of loneliness. You also see them on their Graduation Day, all optimistic. Elise was an ambitious starlet and experimenting with her hair and makeup. Brenda and Annie were much more enthusiastic and less insecure. Cynthia was so happy and the center of attention. The song "It's A Beautiful Morning" punctuates the joy of that day...only to cut to the present day with a lonely and depressed Cynthia.
    • When the women temporarily break up and go their separate ways, we see how depressed they are and how empty they are feeling due to hitting a wall in their plan. This is all set to the aforementioned Billy Porter's "Love Is On The Way", making the scene all the more gut-wrenchingly sad. Then Elise, in tears, comes to Brenda's apartment and cries how she doesn't want to end up like Cynthia (especially after Brenda openly questioned Elise, who has a drinking problem, how drunk Cynthia must have been when she took her life.)
  • Values Dissonance: Brenda's comment towards Shelly about being bulimic is very crude and mean-spirited, as eating disorders are a serious issue that many girls and women go through, and are very hard to recover from (often leading to death). Granted back in the 1990s, eating disorders were already then recently being taken seriously as a mental health concern and a women's rights issue in contrast to the 1970s-1980s where it was a sign of the excesses of capitalism (back when Brenda was younger), and Shelly certainly isn't the nicest of people, but the comment looks more acute in The New '10s when there was more awareness and concern for mental health issues and body image issues.
  • Values Resonance: Although initially shocked/in denial about her daughter coming out as a lesbian, Annie is then nothing but supportive of her, so much that she went to the gay club that Chris frequented to show her support. Moreso, not only did she bring Brenda and Elise with her, Brenda then consoles a woman who lost her partner to a younger woman (and later pretends to be dating Elise in order to get her out of the club), while Elise is thrilled about being called beautiful by one of the clubgoers.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The film cuts the First Wives Club's revenge against Gil, Cynthia's ex-husband, from the book, when arguably Gil is the worst of the ex-husbands, having driven his wife to suicide and showed up to the funeral with the woman he abandoned Cynthia for. The most justice Cynthia gets is having the crisis center named after her, which puts her ex in a worse light.
  • The Woobie: Cynthia. She helps her husband climb in the financial world, only for the ungrateful prick to dump her for a younger woman. This leads her to drinking and eventual suicide.

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