Gripping performances in film about Alzheimer’s
With “The Artist’s Wife,” Bruce Dern expands his range. Instead of playing yet another creepy, nasty old guy, he plays a creepy, nasty old guy with Alzheimer’s. And because Alzheimer’s has a way of reducing inhibition and making its victims less aware of social norms, Dern gets to be really nasty in this one.
He plays a great artist, whose idea of mentoring a female student is to tell her to paint with her genitalia — only that’s not the word he uses. He shouts the fword at his estranged and lovestarved daughter (Juliet Rylance) and abuses his longsuffering wife (Lena Olin). Then every so often he cracks up altogether, takes a butcher knife to the furniture and turns the living room into a threedimensional, Abstract Expressionist nightmare.
Early in the film, a woman, speaking of her own divorce, tells the title character how happy she has been since leaving her husband. The unmistakable suggestion in “The Artist’s Wife” is that Olin, as the wife, will be happier when her husband has finally gone to his reward. In that way, the movie — written and directed by Tom Dolby — announces itself as the story of a woman reclaiming her autonomy and identity in anticipation of her husband’s imminent incapacity and death.
That in itself makes “The Artist’s Wife” a little different. It’s not about the guy with Alzheimer’s, and it’s not about the caretaker insofar as she is a caretaker. It’s about a woman’s longdelayed rebirth and the opportunities that will soon arise from a domineering presence leaving the scene.
As such, the movie deals with the interplay of marriage and selfhood, the sacrifices of the latter for the former, and the ways in which it’s possible for a spouse to be miserable for years — not in a sobbing, shrieking way, but with sadness as a kind of lowgrade fever that begins to seem normal because it never goes away.
Dolby provides Dern with a chance to be cranky and vicious, but what else is new? The revelation here is Lena Olin, who gets her best role in years as the artist’s second wife, Claire, an artist in her own right who gave it all up to make a home with and for a demanding husband.
In her performance, Olin is able to suggest the contours of a life, of a way of thinking. We see someone who has accepted limits without resentment and now is beginning to expand without fear. In temperament and perception, Claire is an exceptional person who thinks of herself as merely above average.
Some of the elements seem forced, such as the hostility of the artist’s daughter toward Claire, and Claire’s willingness to be a doormat in the face of that hostility. But Dolby counterbalances that with some effective and tense scenes between Dern and Juliet Rylance, in which the artist, with no filter, finds new ways to be cruel.
Some of what we see is directly attributable to the writerdirector’s own experience: Tom Dolby is the son of the renowned sound pioneer Ray Dolby, who had Alzheimer’s and died in 2013. Certainly, the portrayal of someone in the grip of Alzheimer’s — the erratic behavior, the rage, the everpresent possibility of violence — will ring true to anyone unlucky enough to have seen similar scenes firsthand.