TIME FOR HER CLOSE UP
The Wife shines well-deserved spotlight on brilliant performance by Glenn Close
Word on the street is that The Wife, which had its world première a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, was held back from general release so long to muster an awards push for its star, Glenn Close.
It could work. Close is incredible as Joan Castleman, longsuffering spouse to famous writer Joe (Jonathan Pryce), who, as the film opens in 1992, has just received the Nobel Prize for literature. He responds to the news with a childish fit of jumping on the bed, where he’s just recently put some juvenile moves on his wife.
Joe’s romantic tactics will be revisited later in the film, as will his method of celebrating good news. In fact, Jane Anderson’s screenplay, adapted from the popular 2003 novel by Meg Wolitzer, cleverly circles back on all manner of tiny details, forcing us to see fragments of married life refracted in new and revealing ways. (Pay attention to Joe’s favourite James Joyce quote, which gains fascinating gradations.)
Most of the action takes place in ’92 as the couple takes the Concorde toward Stockholm and the Nobel ceremonies, but there’s a vital subplot that winds the action back to 1958, when young Joe (Harry Lloyd), then a literature professor at an all-female college, falls for his student Joan, played by Annie Starke, Close’s actual daughter.
Little signs pile up until we’re pretty sure Joe is a first-class — well, let’s use the word cad, though I’m sure you’ll think of others. In spite of the sex of his students, he insists on stressing the masculine pronoun when discussing what makes a writer write. He shamelessly hits on Joan, first for babysitting services (he’s already married), and then for a kiss. And then for more,
both personally and professionally. “I am a kingmaker,” older Joan tells Sweden’s King Gustav (Nick Fletcher), at the laureates’ dinner.
Through it all, Pryce admirably plays the part of Joe dishonourably playing the part of the humble but brilliant man of letters. He is demonstrably thankful for his wife, though he shows little warmth for son David (Max Irons), telling the younger writer that his characters, “the blowhard husband, the stoic wife with the repressed rage,” are clichés lacking in substance. The irony that he might be a living trope himself escapes him completely.
Joan is no doormat, but she has become adept over the decades of dealing with the details of Joe’s life. She always knows where his reading glasses are, organizes his pills and can deliver a subtle sign from across a crowded room to let him know he has food in his beard.
Unfortunately, this leaves him free to concentrate on other things, such as the pretty photographer (Karin Franz Körlof ), who’s been assigned to document his stay in Stockholm.
The marriage is far from perfect, but it might be deemed stable until sycophantic wouldbe biographer Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), starts slithering around, first accosting the couple on the Concorde (no way to hide on such a tiny plane), and then buttonholing Joan while her husband is out doing — well, God knows what — to ask about certain rumours.
“If you’re trolling for nuggets of bitterness you’ll find none here,” she tells him coolly, but even that line carries a whiff of malodorous subtext.
Pryce perfectly plays the part of a male ego growing even more fragile with advancing age, but it’s a type we’ve seen before, in life as well as art. Far more fascinating is Close as the title character, a real enigma. Her visage is a mask when facing Nathaniel’s inappro- priate questions, but when no one — i.e., only we in the audience — is looking it can register the most subtle shades; angry regret sliding into regretful anger, for instance.
I’ve just realized I haven’t even named Swedish director Björn Runge, but his genius here is to remain almost invisible, giving his stars the room they need to wound with a word or lacerate with a look. Take the scene where Joan and Joe are quarrelling over his mention of her in his acceptance speech, which reeks of insincerity and irony.
“Give me some credit,” he bellows. To which she replies, at the speed of indignation: “What for?”