Practical Magic

Practical Magic

Promotional poster
Directed by Griffin Dunne
Produced by Denise Di Novi
Screenplay by
Based on Practical Magic
by Alice Hoffman
Starring
Music by Alan Silvestri
Cinematography Andrew Dunn
Edited by Elizabeth Kling
Production
company
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Roadshow Entertainment (Australia & New Zealand)
Release dates
  • October 16, 1998 (1998-10-16)
Running time
 103 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget $75 million
Box office $68,097,643[1]

Practical Magic is a 1998 American romantic comedy film based on the 1995 novel of the same name by Alice Hoffman. The film was directed by Griffin Dunne and stars Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing, Dianne Wiest, Aidan Quinn and Goran Visnjic. The film score was composed by Alan Silvestri.

Bullock and Kidman play sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, who have always known they were different from each other. Raised by their aunts after their parents' death, the sisters grew up in a household that was anything but typical—their aunts fed them chocolate cake for breakfast and taught them the uses of practical magic. But the invocation of the Owens' sorcery also carries a price—some call it a curse: the men they fall in love with are doomed to an untimely death. Now adult women with very different personalities, the quiet Sally and the fiery Gillian must use all of their powers to fight the family curse and a swarm of supernatural forces that could take away all the Owens' lives.

Plot

Maria Owens, a young witch, is exiled to Maria's Island in Massachusetts with her unborn child for escaping her execution. When her lover does not come to rescue her, she desperately casts a spell upon herself to stop falling in love due to heartbreak, only to die soon after. The spell becomes a curse for several generations. Gillian and Sally Owens, two descendants of the Owens family, are taken in by their aunts Frances and Jet after the death of their parents. Sally is the more gifted of the two while Gillian's talents are more in charm and persuasion, and have been subject to ridicule during their youth. After witnessing their aunts cast a spell on a man for a woman who seems obsessed with having his love, Gillian decides to fall in love and Sally casts a true love spell to protect herself.

The sisters cast an oath to each other using blood from both of their hands and Gillian leaves for Los Angeles. Sally meets and marries Michael, a local apple salesman. They have two young daughters, Kylie and Antonia. One morning, after several blissful years of marriage, Sally hears the "death-watch beetle," and knows it is coming for her husband. Despite tearing up the floor in an effort to find and kill the beetle, Michael is killed by a truck during his early morning routine of taking apples to the local farmers market. Sally and her daughters return to the Owens home to live with the aunts, and realize that the aunts cast a spell so she could fall in love. Sally decides that she and her daughters will not perform magic. As Gillian begins a relationship with Jimmy Angelov in Orlando, Sally is devastated by her husband's death. Gillian feels that Sally needs her and drugs Jimmy to return to Massachusetts.

Gillian returns to Sally after Jimmy becomes abusive, but the sisters are kidnapped. Sally puts belladonna into Jimmy's tequila, inadvertently killing him. The sisters resurrect him using the forbidden spell from their aunts' book of spells, but Jimmy attempts to kill Gillian after being revived. Sally kills him again, and the sisters bury his remains in their home's garden. State investigator Gary Hallett arrives from Tucson, Arizona in search of Jimmy, who is also a serial killer. As Gary begins to suspect Sally, Gillian, Kylie and Antonia create a potion to banish Gary; however, the girls realize he is the one described in Sally's true love spell, and remove the potion. Later, Sally has Gary record her testimony and sees the letter she had once written Gillian, and realizes he must have read it more times than he had let on. Unable to deny their feelings for each other, they kiss and Sally realizes that he was there because of the spell she cast years earlier.

Sally discovers that Jimmy's spirit has possessed Gillian's body and Gary sees Jimmy's spirit emerge. Jimmy attempts to possess Gary, only to be hurt by his silver star-shaped badge and is temporarily exiled. Later, Sally tells Gary that he is there because of her spell and the feelings they have for each other are not real. Gary replies that curses are only true if one believes in them and reveals that he also wished for her, before returning to Tucson.

Jimmy possesses Gillian again and attempts to kill Sally before Frances and Jet return. Sally, realizing she must embrace magic to save her sister, asks the aid of the townswomen and they form a coven to exorcise Jimmy's spirit. Sally makes them stop when she sees that the effort might kill Gillian. Getting inside the circle, Sally and the townswomen reenact her oath with Gillian. They are able to break the Owens curse, exorcising Jimmy's spirit and allowing the coven to exile him permanently. Sally receives a letter from Gary telling her that she and her sister are cleared of any suspicion of wrongdoing in Jimmy's case and Gary returns to Massachusetts to be with Sally. The Owens women celebrate All Hallow's Eve dressed up in witch costumes, and are embraced and welcomed by the townsfolk.

Cast

Production

Practical Magic was partially filmed on an artificial set in California. The film's producers said the house was a big part of the depiction of the Owens' culture, so they knew they had to build a house to accurately depict this. They built it on Coupeville, Washington.[2] They brought much of the set from California and placed it inside the house, but it still took almost a year to perfect the image of the house and the interior.[3] The house used is owned by the Sundstrom Family and is located on San Juan Valley Road, San Juan Island. They built a replica of the outside of the house on the west side of San Juan Island so that it looked like the house was on the waterfront, but in actuality it is in the valley. They built the house in San Juan County Park but since the house was built only for this filming, it was torn down after the movie was released. Many of the small town scenes were filmed in downtown Coupeville Washington located on Whidbey Island.

According to Sandra Bullock in the DVD commentary, in the scene where the Owens women are drunk and slinging insults, the actresses actually got drunk on very bad tequila brought by Kidman. The cast also thinks that the supernatural elements of the house started to affect them; the cast and crew say that they have heard ghost noises while filming the coven scene at the end of the film. For the final scene with all of the townspeople at the Owens' home, the entire population of the town where filming took place was invited to show up in costume and appear as townsfolk.

Music

Practical Magic

Photo by Suzanne Tenner
Soundtrack album by Various artists
Released October 6, 1998 (original pressing)
Recorded August 15–16, 1998,
Abbey Road Studios (Michael Nyman tracks)
Genre Soundtrack, pop, minimalism, orchestral
Length 56:58 (Nyman pressing); 51:46 (Silvestri pressing)
Language English
Label Reprise/WEA
Producer Danny Bramson, Sandra Bullock
Michael Nyman chronology
Strong on Oaks, Strong on the Causes of Oaks
(1998)		 Practical Magic
(1998)		 Ravenous
(1999)
Alan Silvestri chronology
The Parent Trap
(1998)		 Practical Magic
(1998)		 Stuart Little
(1999)

Composer Michael Nyman's score to the movie was abruptly replaced with music by Alan Silvestri for the theatrical release. This last-minute change resulted in the release of two soundtracks, although as primarily a compilation album, only the two tracks of newly created material were changed. A 50-track demo (the last two tracks being "Convening the Coven" and "Maria Owens") of Nyman's score has been circulating among fans as a bootleg. The complete Nyman score runs 62:30 and contains music that would later appear, in altered form, in Ravenous and The Actors, as well as a bit of his stepwise chord progression theme from Out of the Ruins/String Quartet No. 3/Carrington/The End of the Affair/The Claim. "Convening the Coven", though not "Maria Owens", was subsequently reissued on The Very Best of Michael Nyman: Film Music 1980–2001, and music that uses material related to this piece has not been used elsewhere.

Singer Stevie Nicks headlined the soundtrack's published advertisements, promoting her songs "If You Ever Did Believe" and a new recording of her song "Crystal", both songs featuring Sheryl Crow on back-up vocals.

Track listing
  1. "If You Ever Did Believe" – Stevie Nicks
  2. "This Kiss" – Faith Hill
  3. "Got to Give It Up (Pt.1)" – Marvin Gaye
  4. "Is This Real?" – Lisa Hall
  5. "Black Eyed Dog" – Nick Drake
  6. "A Case of You" – Joni Mitchell
  7. "Nowhere and Everywhere" – Michelle Lewis
  8. "Always on My Mind" – Elvis Presley
  9. "Everywhere" – Bran Van 3000
  10. "Coconut" – Harry Nilsson
  11. "Crystal" – Stevie Nicks
  12. "Practical Magic" – Alan Silvestri / "Convening the Coven" – The Michael Nyman Orchestra
  13. "Amas Veritas" – Alan Silvestri / "Maria Owens" – The Michael Nyman Orchestra

Reception

Box office

Practical Magic opened at #1 with $13.1 million in ticket sales. The film went on to gross $68.1 million worldwide, less than its $75 million production budget.[1]

Critical reception

Practical Magic received negative reviews from film critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 20% approval rating, based on 55 reviews, with an average rating of 4.4/10 and the site's consensus states: "Comedy, romance and horror mix with unsatisfying results."[4] Another review aggregator, Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 1–100 reviews from film critics, calculated an average rating score of 46 based on 22 reviews.[5]

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave Practical Magic a negative review, calling it "a witch comedy so slapdash, plodding, and muddled it seems to have had a hex put on it."[6] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said that the film "doesn't seem sure what tone to adopt, veering uncertainly from horror to laughs to romance."[7]

Accolades

Year Nominated work Award Result
1999 Funniest Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture
Dianne Wiest		 American Comedy Award Nominated
1999 Favorite Supporting Actress – Comedy/Romance
Stockard Channing 		Blockbuster Entertainment Award Won
1999 Favorite Actor – Comedy/Romance
Aidan Quinn 		Blockbuster Entertainment Award Nominated
1999 Favorite Song from a Movie
Faith Hill
For the song "This Kiss". 		Blockbuster Entertainment Award Nominated
1999 Favorite Supporting Actress – Comedy/Romance
Dianne Wiest		 Blockbuster Entertainment Award Nominated
1999 Best Performance in a Feature Film – Supporting Young Actress
Camilla Belle		 Young Artist Award Nominated
1999 Best Performance in a Feature Film – Supporting Young Actress
Evan Rachel Wood		 Young Artist Award Nominated

Efforts for television series

In 2004, Warner Bros. and CBS produced Sudbury, a television pilot written by Becky Hartman Edwards, starring Kim Delaney in the role played by Bullock in the film, and Jeri Ryan in the role played by Kidman.[8] The series, named for the Sudbury, Massachusetts location of the novel and film, was not picked up.

In 2010, Warner Bros. and ABC Family attempted to develop a reboot television series.[9]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 "Practical Magic". The Numbers.
  2. ↑ "Practical Magic: A Victorian House Fit for a Witch". Hooked. 25 October 2009. Retrieved 31 October 2012. It looks like a real house that was built in the 1850s, but it’s really just an “architectural shell” that took 8 months to build and was (sadly) destroyed after filming was over.
  3. ↑ "Design". Practical Magic. Amas Veritas. Retrieved 31 October 2012. Months later, key sets like the conservatory, which leads to the garden, were transported to Washington and reassembled so outdoor scenes could be shot. Though this Victorian house looks as if it's been in place for a century, it's actually an architectural shell.
  4. ↑ "Practical Magic". Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster. Retrieved December 4, 2012.
  5. ↑ "Practical Magic". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved December 4, 2012.
  6. ↑ Gleiberman, Owen (October 16, 1998). "Practical Magic Review". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved December 4, 2012.
  7. ↑ Ebert, Roger (October 16, 1998). "Practical Magic". rogerebert.com. Sun-Times Media Group. Retrieved December 4, 2012.
  8. ↑ "Sudbury (TV 2004)".
  9. ↑ Hibberd, James (October 29, 2010). "ABC Family brewing 'Practical Magic' reboot". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved December 18, 2011.
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