Prize rocks shaky foundation
An unusually good adaptation of an unusually good novel, “The Wife” is a wizard of strategy, building an underground arsenal of resentments, evasions and fireworks for an 11th-hour confrontation that neither comes out of the blue nor feels predictable or hackneyed. But let’s talk about Glenn Close first, and Jonathan Pryce second, and a few other things.
Close, who is 71, as is Pryce, has played a rich array of characters since she came on the national scene in “The World According to Garp” many years ago. The protagonist of novelist Meg Wolitzer’s stealthy, witty novel, published in 2003, calls for a series of masks and false fronts, and an actress formidable yet subtle enough to make seeming containment and passivity a clue to something going on behind the polite smiles. Close has been known to push, too hard, in some roles, sometimes out of justified insecurity relating to the material. But in “The Wife” she rises to the occasion, treating what is essentially a chamber piece like a grand opera of thwarted ambition.
Wolitzer’s characters have been shrewdly captured and adapted by Jane Anderson, who did such fine work with “Olive Kitteridge” for HBO. The Castlemans, Joe and Joan, find themselves at an epic moment. It’s 1992. Longmarried, often-cheating author Joe, played with a roiling, exuberant arrogance by Pryce, receives the early morning call for which his entire career as a novelist and short story writer has been designed. It’s Stockholm on the line. He has won the Nobel Prize in literature. (Screenwriter Anderson has upgraded the prize to Nobel level; the novel’s award was a second-best but nonetheless prestigious prize called “the Helsinki.”)
Joan picks up the landline extension at Joe’s urging. As she listens to the reams of praise for her husband, crackling on the line, she becomes wideeyed with — what, exactly? Delight? Disbelief?
The next 90 minutes of “The Wife” answers that question. On the Concorde flight to Stockholm, the Castlemans are accompanied by their grown son David (Max Irons), an aspiring writer himself, perpetually kept at bay by his famous, overbearing, insecure father. Also on board is a wily would-be biographer (Christian Slater, slyly effective), who has been badgering Castleman to approve his writing the definitive portrait of a Great American Writer.
Once they arrive in Stockholm, old habits reemerge. Joe edges up to an affair with his “personal photographer.” Joan knows her husband too well. Then, long-hidden secrets come to the fore at last. En route “The Wife” allows us glimpses of who these Castlemans were, in judicious flashbacks depicting young Joe (played by Harry Lloyd), a creative writing instructor at Smith College, taking a shine to young Joan (Annie Starke, Close’s real-life daughter). She has “the golden touch” as a fiction writer, in Joe’s words; his self-doubt eats at his confidence, and he sees in her a rival, a reminder of his own flaws. How Joe and Joan reconcile their respective talents becomes the heart of “The Wife.”
The director is Swedish native Bjorn L. Runge, whose wife, Lena Runge, served as editor of this self-effacing triumph. Director Runge isn’t a major stylist, and not all the casting’s ideal: Lloyd is serviceable but a bit bland. The shots alternate slow zooms and lateral glides, usually in the direction of Close, with the occasional and somewhat intrusive handheld approach for surface “immediacy.” But Runge is very good with actors. It’s a pleasure simply to watch Close and Pryce establish such minute and careful gradations of happiness, desolation and exasperation in their scenes together. “The Wife” isn’t a two-person show, but it feels like one because these two are so effortlessly interesting. Pryce knows this territory by instinct — he played a Philip Roth-inflected narcissist in “Listen Up Philip,” one of the great comic examinations of the male literary ego in modern American cinema.
The tone of the film version of “The Wife” is a little graver, a little less overtly funny, than its source material. But the tonal shift works because Close and company can do so much, with their lines and in between them, all up and down the scale.