Witches and ’90s fashions: The movie was Pacific Northwest at its heart
Close Your Eyes and picture the distant past. Spaghetti straps and boyfriend jeans, Stevie Nicks on the radio. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman in their rom-com era. It’s 1998, and the movie is Practical Magic. The one thing you might not know: The 25-year-old film belongs in the Washington film canon.
At the time, the adaptation of an Alice Hoffman novel wasn’t necessarily memorable, though its box office take, about $128 million in today’s dollars, is more than Cocaine Bear or the last Magic Mike movie made this year. Its cast was solid—even the kids were played by future notables Evan Rachel Wood and Camilla Belle—and the soundtrack was full of 1970s nostalgia, featuring the aforementioned Stevie Nicks at the height of her solo weird-aunt period.
Where Practical Magic really shone, though, was on cable reruns and at the video store, finding a sweet spot between mainstream and cult status. The confidence of the Clinton years, the insouciance of Generation X at its prime. A film so perfectly of its period that the trailer is scored by Meredith Brooks’s “Bitch.” In 2020 Vulture called it “a chaotic, completely deranged movie” but certifiably “a seasonal classic.”
But wait—wasn’t the movie about witches, in an explicitly New England-y kind of way? In the trailer, didn’t Stockard Channing adopt an East Coast accent so broad she sounded like Katharine Hepburn after a bender? Pacific Northwest how?
Just ask anyone in Coupeville, on Whidbey Island. The exteriors of the town scenes were filmed there, the historic downtown waterfront buildings reimagined as a New England wonderland. Today Coupeville’s chamber of commerce offers a self-guided walking tour of select locations, along with trivia like the fact that Penn Cove Shellfish donated seafood for the film’s farmers market scene.
The number one question from visitors, of course, is the location of the gorgeous Victorian manse that serves as home for all the witchy Owens women. Alas, it was a set constructed for filming and taken down after. But there’s a reason the rugged coastline in the background feels so familiar; the structure was on San Juan Island, in a county park near Friday Harbor.
Given the subject, the town of Coupeville celebrates the movie most around Halloween. The weekend of October 27–29 is dedicated to the film, with screenings Friday and Saturday along with a beer garden, scavenger hunt, and bike ride. Try to ignore the fact that a clump of bicycle racers plays a pivotal role in the film’s saddest death scene.
Thanks to Salem’s whole historical witch hunt thing, New England more or less has a lock on America’s witch culture. But beyond an early flashback to pilgrim-ish times, Practical Magic is nothing but Northwest vibes. The artisanal soap shop run by Sandra Bullock’s character, the aunts decamping to a solstice celebration to dance naked under the full moon. The passive aggressive sniping from townsfolk as rumors of the sisters’s witch powers get around—even as locals sneak to the Owens house for spells and remedies. It just kind of feels familiar.
What’s most notable, 25 years on, is how a film that centers women and kills off the male love interests would feel like an outlier today. (Except for Aiden Quinn, the John Corbett of his day; just ask a Gen X-er.) The Lilith Fair energy was strong in the late ’90s, but without the girl power fervor that made Practical Magic a mainstream hit back then, it would likely be merely a Netflix blip today. Filmmakers made the movie in Washington because the Salish Sea islands are undeniably stunning and believably magical. As a state whose best-known movies are a snooze or total cringe, we could do worse than claiming Practical Magic as our own.
Source: Seattlement
