“And this is what comes from dabbling. I mean, you can’t practice witchcraft while you look down your nose at it.”
Griffin Dunne’s Practical Magic (1998) is certainly a film that’s guilty of dabbling, but it does not look down its nose at witchcraft. It is a box office bomb and a cult favorite, a tonally dissonant quilt of fantasy, comedy, and romance. It wastes the talents of several great actresses: Stockard Channing, Nicole Kidman, Sandra Bullock, Dianne Wiest, and even a young Evan Rachel Wood. The script that can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
It’s also perfect.
Promotional photo for Practical Magic (1998) [Warner Bros]
A comparison to Alice Hoffman’s novel of the same name would be an exercise in futility; I suggest any Witch with an ounce of curiosity should read it. Practical Magic, the film, begins in the past: a Massachusetts seaside town 200 or so years ago has sentenced a pregnant woman named Maria Owens to hang for the crime of witchcraft. Our benevolent narrators tell us her crimes also include being a slut, offending the goodwives of our picturesque not-Salem, and that the family we’re about to meet are her descendants and inheritors of her curse.
Along with hanks of rope from Maria’s averted hanging, the Owens women possess the hex of widowhood. Any man who loves a woman of this line will die an untimely death. Sally (Bullock) and Gillian (Kidman) are orphaned in childhood after their father’s death causes the decline and death of their mother in turn. Aunts Frances (Wiest) and Jet (Channing) assumed custody; they live in a breathtaking Queen Anne by the sea, one with a Nancy Meyers kitchen. It has more attics than a belfry’s got bats.
Shaken by their cruel curse, young Sally casts a spell to ensures she will only fall in love with a man who couldn’t possibly exist. Notably, Sally is moved to her spellcasting after she witnesses her aunts doing magic for money, impaling the heart of a dove to make a man leave his wife and make his way to his mistress. The aunts achieve this work with the help of their Book of Shadows, a magnificent double-bound volume that might be the best visual representation of a BoS in any film.
Sandra Bullock as Sally and Nicole Kidman as Gillian in Practical Magic (1998) [Warner Bros]
Time passes; the now grown-up girls start making their own choices. Sally, the more talented witch, is celibate. Gillian, whose power lays in her sexuality, is anything but. Eventually, the aunts intervene, casting a spell to bring Sally the heart of Michael the apple-man (Mark Feuerstein), who falls to the curse as soon as he gives her two girls of her own. Gillian, entangled with a violent and dangerous man named Jimmy Angelov, comes home to roost. Together, the two sisters kill Angelov (Goran Visnjic) and then use the book to bring him back to life.
If you feel lost, you’re not alone. This film rambles like that Queen Anne, swinging from Stevie Nicks to Marvin Gaye and back to trip-hop again before taking on a solidly upbeat Silvestri quality in the final act.
There are hints of Paganism woven throughout – the aunts take Sally’s young daughters to a festival and the girls come home with garlands of flowers in their hair, crowing “We danced naked under the full moon!” Symbols are imbued with power, like a sheriff’s badge used to banish the baneful spirit of the murdered, resurrected, and re-murdered Angelov.
The Wild Hunt is grateful for the recent support.
The Wild Hunt is very grateful to our readers for your recent financial support and amazing words of encouragement. We remain one of the most widely-read news sources within modern Paganism, and our reporters and columnists remain dedicated to a vision of journalism for and about our family of faiths.
As a reminder, this is the type of story you only see here. This is how to help:
Tax Deductible Donation | PayPal Donations | Join our Patreon
You can also help us by sharing this message on your social media.
As always, thank you for your support of The Wild Hunt!
The magic trick of the film doesn’t come until the third act. The Owens family have been outcasts in their community since Maria’s time. Taunted in public and despised in private, we see three generations fall prey to small town ugliness throughout the film. Using the power of white moms everywhere as a channel for witchcraft, Gillian puts her sister at the top of the PTA phone tree, which is ostensibly a tool for emergency communications but actually just a mean girl burn book for thirtysomethings. Though this shocks the other mothers, it allows the Owens women access to the support of their community for the first time when they really need it.
Angelov’s spirit possesses Gillian’s body in an undead rage, and the aunts tell Sally they need a full coven (“Nine women— twelve is better,” as if any coven has this kind of space) to banish him – and so Sally uses the phone tree as the Goddess intended. Women from all over town, from friends and acquaintances to open antagonists of the Owens line, assemble at the covenstead, each with a broom in her hand.
It would be the work of a simpler film if Sally simply begged for help or guilted these women into rising to her aid. Instead, the movie for just a minute asks a fascinating question: what is a witch, anyway?
Character actress Margot Martindale takes a turn as a minor character, a local woman named Linda Bennett. In a line that seems to have been excised from a lost longer scene where the women share stories about their intuitions and the idea of “dabbling,” she mentions that once her daughter was on a sleepover across town, but she could still somehow hear her child crying. Jet sweeps back in, replying that “There’s a little witch in all of us.”
Goran Visnjic as Angelov and Nicole Kidman as Gillian in Practical Magic (1998) [Warner Bros]
Here we have a family tradition of witchcraft; the kind that many have claimed but few can prove. The Owens family have been witches of one kind or another since the colonial period. In the film, the aunts, the sisters, and finally Sally’s daughters are all shown studying, practicing, and discussing witchcraft as part of their culture. Yet for all their famtrad realness, they don’t argue that the women of their town aren’t capable of the exact same work. Indeed, at the climax of the film they’ve invited these people into their home and into their circle, intending to do magic with them in an expression of trust that everyone’s power can and will be raised in the same way.
The “trouble with dabbling” that the early warning brings up is not the idea that one must do all the witchy things to be a real witch, or that a witch is born and not made, or even that one must suffer to learn. Frances is reminding her nieces that the Craft requires primarily openness and respect. Even these Massholes from the PTA phone tree are capable of producing these things.
And so the circle is cast: these women who have intuitions or curiosity but no training are taught to erect and hold the boundary for a difficult spell. Sally cuts her hand and her sister’s to do a very old form of contagion: she mingles their blood to call their solidarity into the circle, as well. Protected by the barrier made to preserve and contain this power, the blood magic dispels the evil of a bad boyfriend, reaching backward through time until it gets to the source and we see Maria Owens retroactively freed of her own burden, laughing through tears and through the veil of time.
I’m not arguing that this movie is perfect. It failed to make back its own cost at the box office and received terrible reviews upon debut. I’m not arguing that it’s coherent or cohesive; it seesaws through what feels like four different drafts of a script, pausing for absurdities like midnight margaritas or a cop who acts like a decent human being (Aidan Quinn).
But I am here to defend a dabbler who gets results, a ramshackle house that gives shelter to those who need it, and a ritual populated by beginners who only half-believe that still pulls off the magic it sets out to do.
Practical Magic is a film where the witches get what they want, and the charm makes their circle ever wider. Stream it on Amazon, plant rosemary by your garden gate for luck, and fall in love whenever you can.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.