Damn, I wish Glenn Close made more movies.
Here, she plays Joan Castleman, the intelligent, dutiful, and endlessly stoic woman behind a Great Man, her husband, Joe. About to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Joe whisks his wife away to Stockholm for the ceremonies. They bring their son -- himself a struggling writer -- and are forced to tear themselves away from a very pregnant daughter. Unfortunately, the strain of Joe's narcissism reaches an unbearable tension, and Joan is forced to make some wrenching decisions about her work, her family, and her life.
During the course of its too-brief 100 minutes, The Wife dramatizes the energetic unraveling of many years of marriage in a way that is not terribly gimmicky, though it certainly stretches credulity in its efforts to craft a realistic chamber piece. The filmmakers balance expertly crafted drama with melancholic intervals that flash back to what we expect to be a happier time. We quickly learn, however, that in the trials of love and ambition, there can be only one victor.
To say more about the plot would be to rob the film's great pleasure. Not the plot, mind, but rather how the slowly unraveling plot informs our understanding of Glenn Close's amazing performance as the (no less amazingly written) wife. She is far more than meets the eye, of course, and though this is no thriller, shocked gasps whistled through the theater multiple times as we saw her character revealed incrementally.
And though the film clearly prefers Joan to Joe, Jonathan Pryce delivers an awesome performance in a wholly thankless role as the to-be laureate. To call him monstrous might be fitting, once we learn his true designs, but painting these characters in broad strokes is to destroy the finer points of the film. While we may at times be frustrated with these characters for doing (or not doing) what we want, the film reminds us several times -- in emotionally jarring moments of psychological whiplash -- that the people we love are never stock characters. To label these people is to dehumanize them, and us by extension. Even those we love the most can and will hurt us the most; the question is how we respond.
P.S.: The only reason I cannot award this film full marks is that Max Irons, playing their Hamlet-like son, never looks good. In fact, I can scarcely imagine how much effort went into making him look so bad. For shame.
IMDb: The Wife
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