The Wife (2018)

[Simon Boccanegra]

In 1992, celebrated American author Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) is informed that he has won the Nobel Prize. His elegant wife Joan (Glenn Close) and their sullen adult son David (Max Irons), an aspiring writer himself, accompany Joseph to Stockholm for the ceremony. The family is pursued by a smarmy would-be biographer (Christian Slater), who attempts to clear up some suspicions by preying on the barely concealed resentment of Joan and David toward the preening man of letters. Flashbacks to the 1950s and 1960s cover the time when Joan was Joseph's student, and he left his first wife and child for her. Joan herself showed literary promise until she had a discouraging conversation with a female author (Elizabeth McGovern) and heard dismissive things about women writers from the men at a publishing house where she worked. But did she ever really give up writing?  

This is now available for rental on good ol' Vudu. This is fortunate, because if I had trooped out into the single-digit temps and paid extortionate prices to see it in a movie theater, I would not have felt it was worth the exertion or expense. It just isn't a very good movie. Almost nothing in it is convincing or resonant; the outline suggests richer possibilities than what ended up on the screen. The screenplay stacks the deck and asks us to believe things that don't make a great deal of sense, nor flatter even the sympathetic characters. Then it asks us to buy that situations that have endured (improbably) for decades come unraveled at the slightest tug. I was left with distaste for all of these characters, which bothered me less than my inability to find much interest in them. (In The Favourite, I was left with distaste for all of the characters but found a great deal of interest in them.)

It's the sort of rigged, empty "important" movie in which the f-bombs start flying and characters start throwing books around, and you can feel the desperation to inject passion and urgency into a film that earns neither. Björn Runge's direction lacks any flair.

Glenn Close may win her long-overdue Oscar for this, and if so, I suspect the film will be remembered every bit as well as 1994's Blue Sky with Jessica Lange...meaning, barely. Close has been better in worthier films, but I won't object if she wins; she's good here. Jonathan Pryce's role is as thankless as plumbing. Everyone else is just along for the ride.

Edited January 31, 2019 by Simon Boccanegra

[methodwriter85]

I honestly thought Christian Slater was going to try and seduce Max Irons. Now THAT would have been fucking funny. I did think this is the first role I've seen Max Irons in where I thought he had any spark of talent.

Glenn Close's daughter does look a lot like her, and unlike Mamie Gummer, I thought Annie Starke had some decent chops! She inherited her mother's dark blue eyes and patrician nose.

I was having a hard time with the time setting. I think it needed to be moved up to 1998 or the flashbacks had to start with like 1952 because I'm not buying Glenn Close as being in her mid 50's, which is the age the character should be if she was about 20 in 1958. They also say that there's been nearly 40 years of marriage but they would have been married for about 32-34 years if we go by the timeline set up, which isn't really close to 40. If the setting had gone back to 1952, that would've worked. There really isn't anything about the 1958 scenes that would be out of place in 1952. (They stayed away from period music.)

I DID like the casting in as Glenn Close is incredibly WASPy (she's from one of the founding Connecticut families apparently) and that works so much for the role. I also loved the "less is more" approach she took to the role. I'll be pretty happy if she wins.

Edited February 1, 2019 by methodwriter85

[Lonesome Rhodes]

The husband is such a loathsome character that I was unable to enjoy the movie as I watched it.  That The Wife became The Wife by stealing him from his first Wife?  Zero sympathy for Joan.

So, it became an exercise in examining Close's acting choices and technique.  ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.  

The two lead humans simply had to be robotic to get through any day with the core lies they lived as to who they were.  There is no depth to such a human.  With the lone exception of the Daughter, there was not any character of note who was worth a warm bucket of spit.  The portrayals of such people requires one-note presentation.  That's what we got.  The emotions were, to me, empty.  To be very clear, that is not the fault of Pryce nor Close.  They had almost nothing with which to work.

Were this an audition for the Downton Abbey movie, Close would rightly win.  She'd be an awesome foil for Maggie Smith.  Oscar?  Nothing but a participation trophy if she gets it. 

[methodwriter85]

5 hours ago, Lonesome Rhodes said:

Nothing but a participation trophy if she gets it. 

I feel like the backlash to A Star is Born is playing into it. Also, if we're being honest, I came away from A Star Is Born without any real idea or understanding of who Aly is, because Bradley's character just dominated the whole thing.

[Simon Boccanegra]

I agree on the vagueness of the Ally character, methodwriter85, and on Jackson/Cooper hogging the focus with his conspicuously glamorous descent. The televised-incontinence scene notwithstanding, Cooper may be the vainest actor-turned-director since...well, Babs. Not that she was directing yet at the time of her own A Star Is Born vehicle. Well, not by the official credit, anyway. 

However, I don't think A Star Is Born backlash per se is elevating Close. It's generally a right place/right time situation. Everyone else in the category besides Close is a first-time nominee. None of them has even had a supporting nomination in the past, and a couple of them were nowhere on the radar as Oscar-worthy actresses a few years ago. Now, fresh faces have cruised to a win in this category before (Marlee Matlin in '87, Hilary Swank in '00, Marion Cotillard in '09), but this wasn't a year in which any actress had a slam-dunk that had people saying "Just give [X] the Oscar right now, because you won't see a better performance by an actress this year." 

Meanwhile, Close is on lucky nomination #7, and at least two of her non-winning performances, maybe more, could be fairly called "iconic." The Wife will not be the first, second, or third film anyone thinks of when her name comes up in posterity, but she's good enough in it to get the job done. I actually think Colman has a better shot than Gaga at this point, but she's not as central to her film as Close is to hers. Colman, Weisz and Stone are of roughly equal importance in The Favourite.   

Edited February 3, 2019 by Simon Boccanegra

[Cheezwiz]

When Glenn Close started winning awards for this, I was all, "huh? whuuuut? What is this movie and where did it come from?". I'm usually up on independent/foreign releases and I follow festival media coverage, and this one seemingly appeared out of nowhere. So I just watched it on iTunes, and man, I'm glad I didn't pay to see this in the theatre - I didn't think this was a good film AT ALL. 

It was clunky, hacky, and full of familiar cliches. I'm completely baffled as to why it suddenly got all kinds of awards love. Glen Close gave a decent performance, but I certainly don't think it ranks as one of her best. If she is awarded an Oscar, it will be one of those lifetime consolation "sorry we didn't reward you earlier" awards. The characters were all supremely unlikeable and behaved illogically. I did think Close's daughter Annie Stark gave a good performance as the younger flashback version of her character, but the rest? A big meh from me.

I know a lot of people are rooting for Close to win, but I'd like her to win for something better than this. At this point I'm on team Olivia Colman all the way!

Edited February 19, 2019 by Cheezwiz

[Simon Boccanegra]

3 hours ago, Cheezwiz said:

I know a lot of people are rooting for Close to win, but I'd like her to win for something better than this. At this point I'm on team Olivia Colman all the way!

Honestly, I am too. I've seen all but Melissa McCarthy in this category (that's happening tonight, actually; the last Oscar film to check off my list). So far, of the four I've seen, I'd give it to Colman, and hers was my favorite film of the bunch too. But I won't be upset if Close wins. We'll all know it was a lifetime achievement/overdue/make-up award. I prefer that a film be good on its merits when that is obviously what's happening (as The Trip to Bountiful was, with Geraldine Page) rather than another Scent of a Woman, but...eh. Great actors of their time, especially ones with more career behind than ahead, finally getting a competitive Oscar, fine.

(Scent of a Woman should become awards shorthand. "You just know s/he's going to get Scented because s/he's had all those past nominations!")

What's making it a little harder for me to get fully on board is Close extolling this mediocre film as a triumphant achievement. I know she's just being a good soldier in the cause, but she's been reminding us incessantly that a woman wrote the novel, a woman wrote the screenplay, and it's called The Wife, and it took 14 years (or whatever) to get it made. That just makes me think, "All that preparation, and this was as good as they could make it?" The novel may or may not be good, but the screenplay isn't.  

Edited February 19, 2019 by Simon Boccanegra

[blackwing]

I thought this was a great movie.  I didn't think it was nearly as appalling as some of you think it was.  I do think the premise was a little flawed... in the 1950s, a promising writer gets told by Elizabeth McGovern that there is no place in the world for a female writer, and because of that, she just gives up?  I guess it was the 1950s but it's not like there were never any women writers before then... what about Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Agatha Christie, etc.  She was already working in a publishing house and appeared to be a secretary or something to the big boss... when he asked if there were any good Jewish authors, why couldn't she have approached him and said it was her own work and then they decide together to publish it under a pen name?  Why did she have to pretend it was her husband's work?  I think it would have been better if she had told the editor that it was her own work, and then had him shoot her down and say that he wasn't going to publish a woman's work.  Then maybe a scene of a discussion between her and her husband and the editor where the editor says that they will attribute the work to her husband, and in a few years if it becomes successful, they will reveal the truth.  But then of course they never did.  I think this would have helped me understand why such a strong and brilliant woman would have allowed herself to get into the position she did.

I absolutely hated the Jonathan Pryce character.  He kept up the public persona of being the writer but then privately acknowledged to his wife that it was her work.  He mentioned to her twice that "there's nothing wrong" in what they had done, i.e., her writing the books and publishing under his name.  But then at the very end he kept insisting that he wrote the books and she was the editor.  At one point I actually believed that he was suffering from dementia and that he was truly confused about everything.  He told everyone that she was not a writer.  He took credit for everything and said that "I've worked so hard" for the Nobel Prize when he learned he was getting it.  I honestly have no idea how he was able to keep up the deception for so many years.  There would have been author interviews and press, especially as he was becoming more famous.  He didn't even know the name of the character in his most famous book.

I thought Glenn Close was masterful.  She didn't have a lot of showy scenes until the end, but her performance was such a subtle display of resigned resentment.  You could see it in her glances and her expressions, she did so much with the character even when she wasn't saying a word.  I think she deserves this Oscar and it's not just for her entire body of work or a lifetime achievement award.  I think it'd be great if she won, to show that you don't have to uglify yourself, gain weight, play someone with a disability, or put on the teary, screamy performance to win Best Actress.  You can be subtle to the core and still have people recognise your incredible performance.  She made me feel for her character.  Initially, I was thinking, well it's your own fault, you created this image and this person that is stealing your thunder, you have nobody to blame but yourself.  But I found myself becoming very sympathetic towards her.  

Is the movie perfect?  No.  I think part of the problem is that we didn't see what happened in between when they were young and in their 20s and when they were old and in their 60s.  How did she deal with all this throughout the years?  What about when he was at the peak of his career, when they were middle aged?  I wonder if the book fleshes this out more.  She states at one point that "I don't want to be thought of as the long-suffering wife".  It was obvious that was what she was, but I would have appreciated more scenes of how she exactly came to get to that point.  And moreover, why she was willing to continue it for so many years.  The supporting characters weren't great.  The Christian Slater character was slimy and irritating, but I think he was supposed to be.  The Max Irons character was pointless.  The daughter was extraneous.

[angora]

I thought it was really great as well, and I thought Glenn Close was wonderful.  I've seen a number of actresses playing women who are in that sort of "chafing under a life of quiet desperation" role, but Joan was so interesting to me.  It was clear that the bullshit was so obvious to her all the time, watching Joe from across the room as he charms people with his stupid anecdotes or the way her posture changes just a little whenever he calls her over to be introduced (I love the scene when Joe and another Nobel recipient are doing their introductions and Joan has this completely-silent connection with the other guy's wife.)  And yet, when someone offers her an outlet, when Christian Slater comes poking at the secrets, she's totally unflappable, not giving him a single inch.  So she knows it's all bogus, and she's clearly seething under it, but she's actively choosing to remain in that situation.  And yet, as strange and oppressive as it is, she needs it to be on her terms at least a little.  The one thing she asks for in all of it is not to be thanked as the "long-suffering wife"/rock/muse/"my everything" and so on, and when Joe doesn't honor that, that's when she's had it. 

I agree, blackwing, that we could've used a little more setup on why she agrees to this arrangement or something more of that in-between time.  For me, it's a combination of a few things.  The meeting with that author clearly has a big impact on her, and I think that scene in the publisher's office features them griping/joking about "lady authors" right before asking if they know any Jews, indicating that they're interested in authors from some backgrounds and not others.  Put that together with Joan's tendency to retreat to the background whenever she's in a crowd, and she may have decided that, while it's true that some women are able to make it through, she doesn't think she'd be able to withstand that fight she'd have to put up just to get someone to give her work a try - Joe, on the other hand, is a schmoozer who's perfectly at home as the center of attention/getting people to listen to him.  And then, there's just the way that so many women have been taught to put men's needs above their own, and Joe clearly wants it so much more LOUDLY than she does (not necessarily the same as wanting it more.)  It all leads to this one bad decision that I'm sure she (and Joe, to some extent) feel trapped in once they do it.

One scene that really sticks with me is that early flashback where Joe is teaching a class and waxing poetically on how "a writer must write" blah-blah-blah, and the whole time, he's using "he/him" pronouns.  It reminded me of the start of On the Basis of Sex, when Sam Waterston's character stands in front of all the new law students going on about "what makes a Harvard man," but the difference there is that there are only nine female students in a sea of men.  Joe's class is FILLED with female writing students, and he STILL continually says "he."  It's so clear in that moment that his aim isn't to teach/inspire his students in their own writing but to impress upon them how wonderful HE is as "the writer who writes because writing is in his soul" or whatever it is.  That tells me everything I need to know about him.

[Cheezwiz]

13 hours ago, Simon Boccanegra said:

What's making it a little harder for me to get fully on board is Close extolling this mediocre film as a triumphant achievement. I know she's just being a good soldier in the cause, but she's been reminding us incessantly that a woman wrote the novel, a woman wrote the screenplay, and it's called The Wife, and it took 14 years (or whatever) to get it made. That just makes me think, "All that preparation, and this was as good as they could make it?" The novel may or may not be good, but the screenplay isn't.  

I am utterly floored that this got any awards attention at all. Floored. And the info about the years it took to make makes me even more incredulous. Poorly, sloppily written, cliche piled upon predictable cliche. And the dopey ending! Each and every character was unlikeable including Close's titular character. Hated the narcissistic dolt of a husband, the one-note surly son, and I found myself unable to sympathize with Joan at all (really lady? you stayed married to this twit for close to 4 decades, and you're only starting to boil over now?) . I'm not saying Close's performance was bad, just that it didn't seem extraordinary enough to merit awards hype.

7 hours ago, blackwing said:

Why did she have to pretend it was her husband's work?  I think it would have been better if she had told the editor that it was her own work, and then had him shoot her down and say that he wasn't going to publish a woman's work.  Then maybe a scene of a discussion between her and her husband and the editor where the editor says that they will attribute the work to her husband, and in a few years if it becomes successful, they will reveal the truth.  But then of course they never did.  I think this would have helped me understand why such a strong and brilliant woman would have allowed herself to get into the position she did.

Yes, THIS. This is a big part of why I hated the movie. Nothing in the story made sense in terms of her motivations. Of course there were successful women authors at that time. She just takes one person's word for it and gives up?

I rented this on iTunes and am frankly kind of pissed that I wasted $6 on it. Will continue to catch up on other Oscar nominees. This one was a big dud.