Over the weekend, Sex and the City left Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in a cloud of movie dust (the weekend gross of Sex was $55.7-million to a mere $46-million for Indiana.) Sex and the City, based on the HBO series of the same name, follows the trials and tribulations of Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) and her three, fortyish girlfriends. For two hours and twenty-five minutes, it delivers sex (and talk about sex), clothes (and talk about clothes), and feelings (and talk about feelings).

What women lead lives anything like the lives of the women in this movie? What women have these kinds of jobs, or apartments, or clothes? None, as far as I know, but that’s hardly the point. If you enjoy thinking about women, and what they’re like, or like observing them when they are around other women, the movie rings true — taken as a whole, that is. When men aren’t around, women are wonderful to one another, and are both funny and fun.

The reviews of the movie I’ve read, however, have been scathingly negative. Manohla Dargis, in The New York Times, called it “depressingly stunted,” and Carrie, its lead character, “awash in materialism and narcissism.” Rex Reed at The New York Observer was viciously cruel, opening his review by saying “there’s nothing wrong with Sarah Jessica Parker that couldn’t be cured by wart-removal surgery” and that she’d “make a wonderful Halloween witch.” Reed found the movie “irritating, glossy, trite, superficial and boring” (although he admitted that watching episodes of the HBO series was one of his “guilty pleasures”).

These reviewers are spot-on in their criticisms, but they’re absolutely wrong about the movie. Sex and the City is pretend. Its superficiality and glossiness are pretend, forming an artificial world that’s delightful even if considerably silly. OK, so it’s not Citizen Kane. It still tells the story that an old friend in the movie business says is the only story: what somebody wants and why she can’t have it.

The four girlfriends — Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha — are about as real as tooth fairies. On the HBO series, they started out as youngish New York gals, but they’ve now turned into forty-somethings and (gasp!) even a fifty. Without parents or siblings to bother them (or for them to bother about), they’re always free to concentrate on the biggest and most important thing in the world — themselves. They have no money worries, or real job worries, and no anxieties about the greater world and its troubles, or their place in it. Their jaunty, racy jocularity about sex, and their vanity and obsession with clothes and bodies (both male and female), are all they have to offer the world.

Carrie’s on-again-off-again-on-again, Wall Street financier boyfriend “Big” (as she and her girlfriends call him) offers a perfect postmodern version of Darcy. Like the original, he’s aloof, and prefers being without a woman rather than having to put up with one he doesn’t love. Unlike the original, however, he possesses no moral qualities — unless one counts building a super-sized closet for the woman he loves as a moral quality.

As an antidote to the kind of despair contemporary life has taught us to inflict on ourselves — over global warming, neverending wars, natural disasters, and the rest — the superficiality of the movie is eminently forgivable. Its moral imperative, “Look good while you explore your feelings,” is a welcome relief. Sure, Sex and the City is a waste of time compared to working on your dissertation or revising your class syllabi, but it’s also a lot of fun — hardly the first such combination. But for those of you who insist on a deep truth in every film you pay to see, this one reminds us that while most women will forever be both foolish and untrustworthy, so will most men.