Glenn is Close to perfection
The Wife C ert: 15A 1hr 40mins
Glenn Close is now 71 and, when you think of her best work, there’s no doubt you quickly find yourself going a long way back. Fatal Attraction – the iconic Eighties sex thriller that turned her into a household name but made her very unpopular with rabbits – is more than 30 years old now, while Dangerous Liaisons – in which she played another sexually scheming temptress – is only a year younger.
Of course, over the years she’s subsequently made some very decent films – The Paper, Air Force One and Cookie’s Fortune – and enjoyed commercial success with 101 Dalmatians. But ever since her last award hope, Albert Nobbs, failed to turn a sixth and somewhat fortuitous nomination into what would have been her first actual Oscar, there’s been a sad feeling that, as far as the big screen was concerned, her best years were behind her.
Well, wrong, wrong, wrong. In The Wife, Close gives a performance of such devastating delicacy you can’t take your eyes off her. And this time she deserves every nomination and accolade coming her way.
Based on the 2003 novel by the American author Meg Wolitzer, this audience-pleasing adaptation gets off to the most wonderful start, with a long-married senior couple, the Castlemans, in bed together but unable to sleep. Which is not surprising when we discover that he, Joe Castleman – superbly played by Jonathan Pryce – is a giant of the literary world nervously awaiting the early morning phone call that will signal he’s won the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature. When milky drinks and small hours chat don’t work, he finally suggests a little nocturnal nookie, a suggestion that Joan (Close) good-naturedly goes along with. When the phone finally rings in the morning and they bounce on the bed together – ‘We won the Nobel prize, we won the Novel prize…’ – it confirms our impression that the Castlemans are the happiest and most enduring of creative couples. Ah, but what sort of film would that be? The first cracks appear at a hastily arranged family celebration, when Joe can’t find a kind word of encouragement for his adult son (Max Irons), who has aspirations to be a writer himself and longs for his father’s approbation. But approbation comes there none, as we increasingly realise that when it comes to the vainglorious Joe it’s all about me, me, me.
But he does find time to publicly thank his wife Joan, the ‘love of my life… without this woman I am nothing’, a sentiment so commonplace it would be its absence that we would notice, not it’s totally unremarkable presence. Unremarkable, of course, unless he really would be nothing without her.
Gaining an extra star for featuring Concorde (I jest, but goodness don’t we miss it), the action swiftly moves to Stockholm and the extraordinary preparations for
‘A highly intelligent woman who’s played a supporting role all her life might have had enough’
the prize ceremony itself. Now, with so many apparently informed glimpses behind the Nobel scenes, it becomes apparent why the Swedish film-maker Bjorn Runge was brought in to direct.
And what a good job he does, as we watch Joe’s ego being relentlessly stroked by Nobel flunkies, spot the return of what we already suspect has been his relentlessly roving eye, and, as Runge begins to blend distant past with present, with the creative use of flashback, start the fascinating progress of discovering how it all began. Turns out Joan was once an aspiring writer too… and rather a good one.
Despite being set in 1992, this often amusing but sharply insightful film is absolutely perfect for the times, the story of a highly intelligent woman who’s played a supporting role to a man her entire life but who, all of a sudden, might just have had enough.
It’s not a film, however, simply content to blame men for everything. Yes, Joe is clearly a monstrously deluded narcissist but Joan has been complicit in her own subjugation, almost opting for her behind-the-scenes role. And it was another woman – a nice cameo from Elizabeth McGovern – who so influentially tells her not to bother writing herself. It’s a man’s world, she’s told. But that was in 1960: it certainly isn’t any more.
The last lap does smack of melodrama a little. Christian Slater is splendidly ghastly as the wouldbe biographer desperate for the inside track and Pryce gives a masterclass in ageing male vanity, but it’s Close who shines in a production tailor-made for her talents, conveying more by quietly saying and doing almost nothing for a magical moment or two than most actors noisily do in an entire film.