Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2011)

Windi Murdoch has a mean right hook. Mess with husband Rupert and she will fuck you up. No joke. Awesome wife, she is. But movie producer? Not so much. Ms. Murdoch’s first foray into Hollywood is “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” a sufferable drama about four women suffering in modern day and 19th century China. What we learn: Friendships among women are good, sexism is bad, and foot-binding is really bad. Confession: I already knew all this going in.

The gist: In modern day Shanghai, successful businesswoman Nina (Li Bingbing) is set to move to New York when she learns estranged BFF Sophia (Gianna Junn) has been in a terrible accident. A distraught Nina rushes to the hospital to be by Sofia’s bedside. There, Nina finds a typed manuscript in Sophia’s belongings, an account of two women in 1800s China growing up and marrying in a society where women were mere son-bearing sex objects. I was never certain if the manuscript was fiction, or a historical record. I don’t care enough to know.

Director Wayne Wang (“The Joy Luck Club”) desperately wants us to care for these four women, but the heart just isn’t there. Nor the punch-in-the-gut drama. Riffing on “Godfather Part II” style editing, he cuts back and forth between past and present, making the audience work to keep up with what’s going on when, and who’s who, and giving us a clear choice in deciding which story is more boring. I vote for the modern tale as it was written fresh for the screen. It has female struggles that are just laughably bad, with high school drama galore and adult Sophia living in a “poverty” that half the modern world would kill to experience. The hokey English-written lines do not help.

The book, from which this film is based, focuses solely on the 1800s. Yet this historic portion is never allowed to dig deep. Yes, we see terrible sexism, and beatings, and cruel mothers-in-law, and it all happened to some one, but it has been played in a hundred other films. The editing does not help, denting emotional impact. Case in point, we witness a village massacre and the cold death of a child, but the scenes trip across the screen with a shrug, almost as if the script blankly stated “Insert Massacre Here.” The running villages scene could be stock footage for all I know. The music is standard issue, too.

Several unintended LOL moments derail this snoozer into distracting life: Hugh Jackman saunters on screen as a charismatic lounge singer because … I have no idea. Is he pals with fellow Aussie Rupert Murdoch? A woman near me yelled, “Oh, good! He’s gorgeous!” Worse still, the four women cross into each other’s time lines, because it’s … a trite liberal salute to women facing oppression throughout history? A stab at saying everything changes even as nothing changes? “Doctor Who” time travel? I have no idea. I burst out laughing, and others did near me, as two centuries-dead women with bound feet sipped coffee on an art deco high-rise patio. Not what Ms. Murdoch or Wang were going for, eh? D+