Glenn's never been Closer to an Oscar
With a mesmerising performance as a wronged wife, why ...
WINSTON Churchill once said that his greatest achievement was to persuade his wife, Clementine, to marry him. I’ve always thought that Churchill can be excused almost anything, so I’ll acquit him from the generalisation that men who say that about themselves are usually engaging in rather icky false humility.
American novelist Joe Castleman (played by Jonathan Pryce) is just such a man.
‘The love of my life … without this woman I am nothing,’ he declares, of his wife Joan (Glenn Close), when his friends and relatives gather to toast the announcement of his Nobel Prize for Literature. He goes on to echo the Churchill line, and everyone smiles dutifully, recognising it for what it is, a great man generously tossing his loyal spouse a platitude.
But this film, adapted by Jane Anderson from a 2003 Meg Wolitzer novel, explores the extent to which Joe, whether knowingly or not, was speaking the truth. Maybe, without the support and sacrifices of his wife, he would have been nothing. Or at any rate a much lesser something.
This is one of those films, rather like Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015) in which Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling played the longmarried couple, which holds up a mirror to all those of us with marriages of, let’s say, 25 years or more. It can sometimes be a little unsettling what you see.
The story, set mostly in 1992, moves from Connecticut to Stockholm, where Joe is to receive his Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden. But there are quite a few flashbacks, too.
Some whisk us all the way back to 1958 when Joe and Joan first met. He was her narcissistic but charismatic creative writing professor, married with children. She was his pretty star pupil, who would sometimes babysit. By the Sixties, which we also see in flashback, Joan (nicely played by Close’s daughter, Annie Starke) has become his second wife and is already allowing her writing career to be subsumed by his, on the basis that a talkative, male, Jewish novelist in the mould of Philip Roth or Saul Bellow is likely to be much more marketable than a selfeffacing woman. These occasional voyages back in time (with Harry Lloyd as the young Joe) are helpful in a narrative sense, but also count as unwelcome distractions from the dynamic between the older Joe and Joan, or more accurately between Pryce and Close.
He overacts by about 10%, but then it’s a role that calls for a big performance, and besides, Pryce over-doing it is more watchable
than many actors getting spot-on.
Close, though, is absolutely mesmerising. In a way, she plays two characters simultaneously.
One is Mrs Joseph Castleman, the wife of the title, who is used to being sidelined, belittled, patronised, and watching with a beatific smile while the world hauls her husband onto a pedestal. The
other is Joan, quietly racked with resentment at the way he lives his life, at his serial infidelities, at his pomposity, at his self-absorption.
They are accompanied to Stockholm by their son, David (Max Irons), who has writing ambitions of his own but has never received the encouragement of his self-obsessed and potentially jealous father, who seems more concerned with whether
David smokes or not. Also on the plane is a journalist, Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), who is intent on writing Joe’s unauthorised biography.
At first he seems like a creep, a borderline stalker. Our instinct as the audience is to want to protect Joan, and even Joe, from Bone’s sly insinuations about their marriage. ‘Please don’t paint me as a victim, I am much more interesting than that,’ Joan tells him. But gradually we see that maybe he’s right, maybe there is more to their relationship than meets the eye.
All the simmering emotions reach boiling point in Stockholm, where Joe, whose libido is in better shape than his heart, flirts outrageously with the attractive young photographer assigned to follow him.
THEN comes the ceremony, where he is anointed as a ‘master of words, a master at portraying the human condition in all its complexities’. The irony is that he barely recognises his own condition.
The Wife is a deeply intelligent film about power, love and delusion in a long-term relationship, and Swedish director Bjorn Runge keeps it moving forward very adeptly, but the story has a theatricality about it that doesn’t always translate successfully to the silver screen. I imagine it would work better on stage.
That said, the camera enables Close, who can express so much
with her eyes alone, to give one of the performances of her alreadyglittering career.
She has had six Academy Award nominations but has yet to win. Could this be seventh time lucky?
Kevin Hart produced, co-wrote and stars in this dispiritingly clunky, witless comedy, so he takes most of the blame.
He plays Teddy Walker, an Atlanta high school drop-out who loses his job as a barbecue-grill salesman when the shop explodes following his elaborate proposal to his improbably perfect, high-flying girlfriend.
To get a job decent enough to impress her, not to mention his bullying father, he has to enrol in night classes held at the very school at which he flunked his exams years earlier.
Inevitably, the boy who loathed him most back then is now the principal.
With Tiffany Haddish playing the unorthodox night school teacher (her techniques involve a boxing ring), and a classful of stereotypes (the dimwit, the rebel, the housewife trying to better herself, the Mexican immigrant), there ensues a series of mirthless episodes that might remind those of you who remember Seventies telly, of Mind Your Language — a sitcom we’d all rather forget.
On the whole it’s desperately poor fare, which in the audience I was in, yielded precisely three halflaughs (I counted).
I confess to smiling when Teddy gets a job in an evangelical fastfood outlet called Christian Chicken, but that was about it. For all his goofy charisma, Hart, who styles himself as a kind of AfricanAmerican Jerry Lewis, cannot save this feeble comedy from itself.