Sunday, December 30, 2018

Catching Up: "The Wife"

 ½ 

The basic premise of The Wife is played as an untold secret, both in this film and in Meg Wolitzer's original novel. On the page, the revelation works, but on the screen it plays like a tease: In hindsight we learn why Glenn Close's Joan Castleman seems so agitated and irritable, and then we know the truth we can marvel at how it was all right there on Close's face. But this would have been a vastly better, more interesting and more fulfilling movie had we known the truth right from the start.

The novel begins with Joan making up her mind about a huge and life-altering decision, then slowly reveals why this decision is the only emotionally rational choice.  The movie saves that the declaration of that decision for its climax, so that everything leading up to it is just one long tease.  One one level, it works, but on another it feels so much like a gimmick that it's easy to resent The Wife for not playing fair either with its audience or with its characters.

Joan is the wife of Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), a successful writer of highbrow literary fiction who, as the film begins, is informed that he has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The movie takes place in 1992, mostly because the story at its center -- the one presented as a secret but that would be so much better if it were the open and fiery heart of the film -- begins some 35 years earlier, when Joe was Joan's writing instructor at an eastern college.

Joan wants to be a writer, but Joe discourages her, as does an unsuccessful author played with boozy resentment by Elizabeth McGovern.  Writers, she insists are meant to be read, and manuscripts are meant to be published. In the mid-century man's world where Joan works as an editorial assistant, there's no way, both Joe and the author maintain, Joan could ever be a success.

Never mind the female writers who had already risen to prominence, who were successful on their own terms, never mind Virginia Woolf and Harper Lee and Carson McCullers, The Wife hinges upon a 1960s woman's willingness to submit to the patriarchy of the publishing world. In its numerous flashbacks (in which Close's character is played by Close's own daughter, Annie Starke), Joan is presented as talented, timid and afraid.

Yet present-day Joan is none of those things, though she is deeply resentful of her husband's success, as is her son David (Max Irons), who accompanies them on the trip to Stockholm to claim the Nobel Prize.  Also along for the ride is Joe's would-be biographer, played by Christian Slater as an irritating sycophant -- though let it be said that Joe himself is an irritating narcissist.

It's a wonder Joan has stayed with him all these years; he offers almost no affection toward her, even in their opening lovemaking scene, which is played merely as a way for him to stave off his anxiety over the Nobel committee's selection.  Joe has no awareness of anyone but himself, and though Pryce plays such a pompous pseudo-intellect with aplomb, the film leaves us no question of why Joan is always gritting her teeth, sighing and standing a few feet behind her husband.

If the story itself doesn't quite work in The Wife, what does work, and very well, is the film's observations of the quotidian struggles of marriage.  Joan's resentments seem well-founded even before we learn the big reveal, and Joe's complete lack of awareness of his own behaviors ring very true.  The best scene comes when the two have a totally justified screaming match that's interrupted by a phone call to tell them that they're grandparents; the way their long-festering anger melts away into a rare kind of love is beautiful and both actors play it perfectly.

The Wife is, above all, a showcase for Close, a six-time Oscar nominee who has never won.  It's designed as an effort to remedy that, and she does transcend the showiness of the role and make Joan into a deeply wounded and sympathetic character despite the weird insistence of both the screenplay and the source novel that Joan and Joe never had any option for doing what they did.

Strangely, though, it's their son David who ends up being the audience's best surrogate: He's exasperated, suspicious, irritated, confused, intrigued and left to do little except watch two mighty personalities go toe-to-toe with one another as they continue trying to hide a secret that's neither as shocking nor as necessary as it purports to be.



Viewed December 29, 2018 -- DVD

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