MisE-En-Cents: In Today's Movies, Upscale Decor Trumps Plot

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Michael Douglas's New York home in A Perfect Murder is a 10,000-square-foot compound, not counting the top floor, with marble everywhere. Susan Sarandon and Ed Harris split their time in Stepmom zipping in a Land Rover and BMW between a sleek, two-story SoHo loft in New York City and a three-story 1860 colonial in suburban Nyack. Married on the Queen Elizabeth II despite no apparent income, the young Parent Trap couple grow up to reside at a sprawling sixty-two-acre Napa Valley winery and a luxurious London mansion near Harrods, both with full- time butlers. Meg Ryan's children's bookstore in You've Got Mail is one Dr. Seuss away from bankruptcy, but she still lives in a 1,200-square-foot Upper West Side apartment that would cause bloodlust in many a young doctor. The teenagers in Cruel Intentions, a modern reworking of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, tool around in a vintage Porsche and pass their adolescence in an 1898 French chateau.

Hollywood has always rewarded itself with fat paychecks and an excess of the finest material possessions platinum cards can buy; if they hit it big, fledgling screenwriters can pocket $1 million a script, and studio executives obsess over who's now driving a Ferrari Maranello. Now that luxurious lifestyle is shaping the cinematic aesthetic, creating in the current movie season an epidemic …