First of all, the magic in Practical Magic (1998) was never practical. Who among us, if faced with the corpse of our sister’s bad boyfriend, would try necromancy to beat a murder charge? Literally no one. But herbal lotion entrepreneur and reluctant witch Sally Owens (Sandra Bullock) was like: Yes, let’s Reddi-Wip a pentagram onto this man’s chest. What could possibly go wrong? Answer: He could possess your sister Gillian (Nicole Kidman), is what.
Critics hated Practical Magic. Roger Ebert deemed it “too scary for children and too childish for adults.” But viewers watched it again and again, because what they wanted more than a coherent plot was to live in an oceanfront Queen Anne mansion, as part of a fiscally stable witchy aunt matriarchy, and to dance around at midnight drinking margaritas. As the film’s legendary producer Denise Di Novi put it, in a recent interview, “half of Pinterest is Practical Magic.”
In the first Practical Magic, that matriarchy was rigorously maintained by an ancient curse, which killed every man who fell in love with an Owens woman. So it felt almost inevitable when Sally’s husband was delivering fruit one day and suddenly hit by a truck. (In the visual parlance of ’90s cinema this is communicated via a long, slow motion shot of apples flying through the air.) Sally moved back to the mansion with her daughters and disappeared under a mound of blankets. Her aunts Frances and Bridget (grand dames Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest) were unimpressed, Bridget AKA Aunt Jet musing: “We didn’t expect you to care about him that much.”
I’m not saying that justifying your death-enforced matriarchy by devaluing male life is healthy. But it did come as a shock when Practical Magic 2 —which I watched surrounded by people wearing “midnight margaritas” t-shirts and the occasional witch hat—turned out to be so deeply dedicated to caring for him that much.
In this case, the doomed man is Gideon (Xolo Maridueña), the boyfriend of Sally’s daughter, Kylie (Joey King). Gideon is so devoted that he initially seems suspicious—but then he’s hit by an SUV while carrying a bouquet of flowers for Kylie, and we revisit the slow motion tragedy of falling perishables. The plot of Practical Magic 2 largely revolves around Gideon receiving a narrative exception to the Owens matriarchy curse. The boyfriend does not immediately die, but is instead grievously injured, and it becomes clear that the Owens family must reassemble its feminine power to get this guy out of his coma.
Still, our witch gals do their best to enjoy the quest.The mansion is back, even if the color grading is a little off. When Kylie gets a vision of a red telephone booth and runs off to England, Sally and Gillian follow, enlisting the help of an emotionally sensitive, heavily tattooed magician (Lee Pace) who throws himself into the role of fan service with utter commitment. He immediately begins shooting smoldering glances at Sally, then escalates to offering her dessert.
Wiest’s reprise of Aunt Jet is so radiantly self-obsessed that she feels like the only true point of continuity between the two films. If only the rest of the film could deliver more of the cozy solipsism that defined the first. Other than Aunt Jet. Gillian gets the closest when she attempts to school her nieces early on. “Love isn’t for our family,” she says. “You can have fun.”
Practical Magic 2 opens in wide release Fri Sept 11, 130 minutes, PG-13
