Glenn’s lucky seven?
GRIPPING TURN AS A WRITER’S
PUB quiz question: which living actor or actress has been nominated for most Oscars without winning?
If you need a clue, she’s jumping up and down on a bed with Jonathan Pryce in this picture.
The woman in the jazzy dressing gown is Glenn Close, who has had to play the gallant loser at six different Academy Awards ceremonies.
Weirdly, an awards bash is also at the heart of the film that should earn her a seventh Oscars nod.
Joan Castleman
(Close) is ecstatic when her husband of 30 years
Joe (Pryce) gets a late-night phone call informing him he has won the
Nobel Prize for Literature.
The pair bounce on their bed like children, but when the esteemed novelist begins to sing “I’ve won the Nobel!” a flicker of resentment darts across her face.
It’s an expression that asks a lot of questions, but Close keeps her cards tantalisingly close to her chest until the shocking finale of this engrossing drama.
On the flight to the ceremony in Stockholm we see that face again when Joe rudely rebuffs a hack (Christian Slater) who wants to pen his biography. He is a little intrusive, but it seems to be his assertion that “the spouse never gets enough credit” that riles the literary icon.
Later, we see Joe failing to offer encouragement to their aspiring writer son David (Max Irons) and learn of decades of affairs.
A series of slightly clunky flashbacks relate how they met in 1958 when Joan (now played by Annie Starke) was a bright student and Joe (Harry Lloyd) was her married creative writing teacher.
It all comes to a head at the ceremony when Joan’s simmering resentment begins to boil over.
It’s a wonderfully understated performance that uses a very different set of acting muscles to the role that brought Close her first Best Actress nomination in 1989. That year, she almost made it with Fatal Attraction but lost out to Moonstruck’s Cher. Can she go one better?
It’s worth an outside bet, but I reckon she will have to go through it all again in February when she will have to clap another singer on to the stage.
If Lady Gaga wins for A Star Is Born, you wouldn’t blame her for boiling over like Joan.
But she’s such a great actress, you won’t even see the lid rattle. What is Book Club about?