Bewitched

ARTS FAIR

ON FILM

Updike at the movies

Too much to see, too little time:June's pride— a rich dowry of cultural proposals

Director George Miller (Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome) has left the precincts of mass culture for a more arcane province—the Rhode Island village John Updike conjured up in his 1984 novel, The Witches of Eastwick, a wicked tale about a mysterious stranger who arrives in town and proceeds to seduce three of its more seductive inhabitants. Susan Sarandon plays an elementary-school music teacher with a gift for the cello, Cher a witchy young widow who sculpts sensual figurines, and Michelle Pfeiffer a divorced mother of six and gossip columnist for the town paper. All cavort with Jack Nicholson's Darryl Van Home (a.k.a. the Devil) in a film as innocently lascivious as the book. Shot in Cohasset, Massachusetts (the real-life environs of the book's author). Witches, The Movie, follows fast on the heels of Updike's Trust Me, a new collection of stories that maps the same terrain.

Updike is our theologian of suburbia. His cozy New England hamlets are a version of hell, but a nice hell, where the witches are housewives and the Devil is interested less in corrupting souls than in building a tennis court.

JAMES ATLAS