Half Magic is a 2018 romantic comedy about female empowerment through sex, work, and friendship with women who are able to come together through their frustration over male dominance.
It’s hard to believe that Heather Graham has been acting in television and film since the late 1980s, becoming certainly a recognizable face but never quite the superstar she probably deserves to be. Most known for her roles in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Boogie Nights, she’s more recently found a home on series like Law and Order and Bliss. With Half Magic, she takes to the director’s chair, her debut, and delivers a sincerely empowering comedy that take a bold no-holds barred approach, flipping things about in a film that somehow loses its traction and message the further it moves on.
Honey (Graham) has a dream. She wants to be a screenwriter and as she is in a relationship with Peter (Chris D’Elia), a huge action superstar, would seem to have a golden ticket. However, he’s not appreciative of her work as it’s not centered on men. Or more importantly, him. Distraught, she ends up at a female empowerment workshop led by an enthusiastic motivator (Molly Shannon) who encourages women to get in touch with their bodies using words I can’t print here. Honey mets Eva (Angela Kinsey) and Candy (Stephanie Beatriz), two other women in unhappy relationships. They bond quickly and soon Candy steers them toward her career as a “hope-ologist”, using ‘magical’ candles to grant wishes. Dreaming of better sex and relationships, can their wishes come true?
If there is anything that works in Graham’s script (she also wrote the screenplay), it’s the skewering of the male dominated film industry, clearing something that feels spectacularly relevant in the current climate of necessary change (D’Elia is dead on in a sardonic take as a man narrow in his thinking). Graham embraces this paradigm shift with comedy, looking to open eyes and put the power in the hands of the women by offering it up on a platter of laughs, which works for some of it but loses a bit of its momentum as it works further past the smart start. Clearly, though, this is a personal project filled with experiences and realities masked behind the humor, with Graham uncompromising at times to shed some light on it without weighing it down in melodrama.
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Obviously, sex plays a major role in the story, the film opening with one such moment that paves the way to dialogue and action that centers a lot on the act of and consequence of sleeping together. Women at Shannon’s seminar celebrate their vaginas and other body parts which leads to other encounters in the movie where sex is seen in all shades of color from bizarre, to manipulative, to uncaring, to needful, and more. Themes of pressure, guilt, masturbation, faith (Johnny Knoxville shows up as a fire and brimstone priest) and identity keep these three women spinning throughout and while all of this makes for worthy conversation, the film can’t sustain the energy or laughs to make this as significant as it should be.
With some very good performances and a sincere message lingering about the heart of it all, the story unfortunately doesn’t have the umph to get us to the finish line, feeling like it’s missing opportunities to really say something important, though Graham is more likely trying to simply to keep the talk going and let us know we can still have a good time at the movies while we make some much needed adjustments.