‘Wife’ looks inside flawed marriage
For those who confuse bug-eyed shouting with great acting, I give you “The Wife,” which I prefer to call “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woof.” The Oscar buzz surrounding this film is going to blow away so
fast, your head is going to spin.
Directed by the Swede Bjorn Runge (“Happy End”) and based on a 2003 novel by Meg Wolitzer and adapted by Jane Anderson (“The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio”), the film, which is set in 1992, tells the story of the seemingly happily married, older couple Joe (Jonathan Pryce) and Joan Castleman (Glenn Close). Even their names make them sound like the same person.
We meet the Castlemans shortly after they enjoy a celebratory romp in bed and, after being feted at parties, they are winging their way to — yes — Sweden in order for Joe, a kind of more happily married Philip Roth figure, to accept the Nobel Prize for literature.
Also on board the flight with them is their mopey, young adult son and aspiring writer David (Max Irons with an apostrophe of hair dangling in front of one eye), and a mysterious gadfly named Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), who wants to write Joe’s biography.
In flashbacks we see how the Castlemans first met when he was a young writing instructor (Harry Lloyd) with wife and kids and she (Annie Starke) was a talented student to whom he was attracted. Everything seems wonderful in the Castleman world, until the cracks begin to form and the little secrets about Joe’s infidelities and his indifference to poor, mopey David, who is like a human buzzkill, slither into the light.
Meanwhile, Nathaniel Bone keeps poking away at Joan, trying to get a scoop. If you didn’t see the big twist coming after the first 15 minutes, you may want to smack yourself in the head afterward.
Yes, “The Wife” rides a wave of deserved feminist outrage at this #MeToo moment and Close is a great pro. But because I felt I knew exactly how it was all going to turn out, I had a hard time taking the film seriously and just wanted “The Wife” to end.