The Darkest Spell in Practical Magic 2 Has Nothing to Do With Witchcraft

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Practical Magic 2 is not the kind of movie whose details one is supposed to dwell over. It’s a nostalgia-fueled sequel to the late-’90s sleepover classic starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, and it expects its audience not to mind, for example, the minor point that its main plotline—the Owens sisters need to break the curse that has plagued their family for generations—is one that was supposed to have been resolved by the end of the first movie.

Similarly, the film asks that you suspend disbelief with regard to some of the movie’s time elements: Worry not that the original movie came out in 1998 and that Sally (Bullock’s character) was the mother of tween daughters in it. The 28 years that passed in the real world passed differently in the universe of the movies, such that Sally’s daughters are now twentysomethings. The other big tell that time has not progressed conventionally in the film is in the appearance of its stars, Bullock and Kidman. At 62 and 59 respectively, they look remarkably similar to their 28-years-ago selves. The movie doesn’t suggest that preserving their appearances is the result of any witchcraft, and the audience knows from seeing Bullock and Kidman promote the movie that that’s just what they look like these days.

It’s rare that 62- and 59-year-old women get to headline a movie, so perhaps we should be celebrating this aspect of Practical Magic 2 , but it seems equally relevant to point out that Bullock and Kidman are only able to do so with the condition that they not look like most people’s idea of a 62- or 59-year-old woman. Like a lot of stars nowadays, they look like 10 or 15 years ago they were given the choice to simply opt out of aging, and they took it. Actors and actresses have always looked better than the average person, but plastic surgery, injections, and other technologies now make the gulf between them and us wider than it’s ever been before.

At the same time, aging looks different than it used to, style-wise. During the first season of the Sex and the City sequel series And Just Like That … , much was made of the idea that Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda were roughly the same age as the gals of The Golden Girls . This was progress—55 looks so much better now! Women are free to keep their hair long, and color it!—with an unsettling undercurrent, like maybe the AJLT girls should be past running around New York City in heels. The Practical Magic movies offer a perhaps even more uncanny example of age not meaning what it used to. The first Practical Magic movie features Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest as Sally and Gilly Owens’ spinster aunts, who read as not elderly but certainly of a certain age . So it’s shocking to discover that at the time it was released, Channing and Wiest were only 54 and 50, several years younger than Bullock and Kidman today.