Inside an imploding marriage

He has won the Nobel prize for Literature for a body of witty and zeitgeisty novels assembled over a 30-year career. She has been the inspirational wife who stood beside him and tolerated the most selfobsessed expressions of his towering creativity. He was married when they first met and therefore she should not be upset if he indulges in a little flirtation with the pretty young photographer who has been assigned to trail them in Stockholm. But she has a larger axe to grind than we might suspect. And his string of fairly pitiable affairs is the least of the problem. As played by Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce, the couple are a carousel of emotions, buried pasts and lives that once seemed about to take very different paths. The Wife takes us back and forth from 1958, as the husband first tastes a little literary success, to 1992 and the days leading up to the Nobel ceremony. We learn that she – Joan – was once a promising fiction writer, but she buried her ambitions in the face of 1950s attitudes to ‘‘women’s novels’’, as laid-out by the preening jackasses she works for at a big-city publisher. Meanwhile, he – Joe – is enjoying success with his first novel. Four decades later, surveying the self-congratulatory, allmale lineup at the Nobels, Joan has cause to wonder how much has changed. The Wife is a showcase for two outstanding performances, terrific support work and exactly the sort of ringingly authentic and chewable dialogue we really don’t hear enough of. Close turns in what might be the best performance of her career, showing us just enough of Joan’s reaction to her husband’s success and escalating boorishness to hint at the tectonic movements happening, and the eruption that must surely be coming. Pryce does some wonderful things in the thankless role of the weak-willed, self-justifying, cowardly and duplicitous Joe. Pryce’s genius is to leave the character superficially publicly charming to the very end. Around these two, Christian Slater as a predatory journalist determined to write Joe’s biography, Max Irons as the couple’s son, and Annie Starke (Close’s daughter), as the younger Joan, are particularly effective. The Wife is a meticulously efficient film that creates its traps and misdirections out of convincingly portrayed emotions. I don’t think I’ve relished a portrait of a marriage in delayed implosion quite so much since Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years. Bravo.