The Wife: Thin Material Redeemed by Great Acting

The Wife (2017/18)

Directed by Bjorn Runge

Sony Pictures Classics, 100 minutes, R (language)

★★★ ½

Among the immutable laws of the film universe are that great actors can transform lackluster scripts and, secondly, Smith College is a go-to surrogate for scenarios involving smart young women making foolish choices.

By the time you read this The Wife probably won’t be playing at a theater near you. That’s a safe prediction, as it’s unlikely it ever did in the first place. There are three very compelling reasons, however, to see this film on DVD or download: Glenn Close as Joan Castleman, Jonathan Pryce as ageing Professor Joe Castleman, and Annie Starke as young Joan.

Most of the story—based on a Meg Wolitzer novel—centers on the Castlemans in their twilight years. They are parents of a daughter, Susannah (Alix Wilton Regan in a brief role), and tormented son David (Max Irons).  Paterfamilias Joe has an ego the size of Sweden that further inflates when he, Joan, and David are flown to Stockholm so that Joe can collect his Nobel Prize for literature. The latter two don’t wish to go, but we quickly learn that Joe is a bit of a bully who passively manipulates Joan through treacly pleas, and browbeats David, an aspirant author with low self-esteem. Joe is also abusive to journalist Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), who yearns to be his biographer. A big event such as winning a Nobel Prize is, of course, the perfect setting for revelations.

Director Bjorn Runge highlights two overlapping narratives of the Castleman marriage. In flashback sequences we meet 28-year-old Joe (played by Harry Lloyd) in his first marriage and in the role of teaching literature to a late 1950s classroom of Smith College students. We can see he’s mostly puffery, but Joe dons tweed, clenches a pipe in this mouth, savages student papers, and expostulates high-toned generalities about tortured writers to a class of gobsmacked Smithies. But he is struck by a story submitted by young Joan (Starke), though he tells her she must “go deeper.” Joan’s voice is stymied further when an acclaimed female writer—Elizabeth McGovern in a cameo—acidly remarks that women writers are not taken seriously and that pursuing a literary career isn’t worth the anguish. We watch as Joan goes from serious student to babysitter to mistress to second wife. In the last role, she is basically the handmaiden that allows Joe to be Joe.

Joan is an extension of Meg Wolitzer’s ego. Wolitzer has been outspoken about what she sees as sexist standards that don’t take women seriously enough to award them big prizes. She’s undoubtedly correct about that, though her angling to be the one who breaks the barrier will require her to write a book better than any she has written thus far. Wolitzer’s oeuvre consists of a several perfectly fine books (The Wife, The Interestings, The Female Persuasion), but none has been of the quality of the dozen women who have won literature Nobels, nor the dozens who’ve won National Book Awards. Wolitzer is a ghostly character haunting The Wife but the truth is, the script based on Wolitzer’s novel is among the film’s weaknesses.    

To elucidate that point, The Wife is more of a short play than a movie. We only enjoy it as a film because of the strength of three fine actors. This film might be Annie Starke’s breakout role for the silver screen. Her skillful depiction of young Joan Castleman is a dance between naivety, vulnerability, and simmering disgust. She makes unwise decisions at several junctures, yet we understand how an incompletely formed personality might do so. As for Glenn Close, what more can one say about an actress who has won a whopping 44 major awards? In The Wife one admires her steely resolve, the way she toys with Nathaniel Bone as a cat would a mouse, and her kettle boil anger. I also suggest you watch her closely. Ms. Close has one of the great plastic faces of all time; simply by the way she tilts her head she can appear older or younger, haggard or maturely beautiful. (Can anyone forget the astonishing scene of Close removing her makeup in Dangerous Liaisons?”) Jonathan Pryce, whose chops were honed in theater, is just a step behind Close. It’s no easy task to imbue a bombastic character with likable qualities. If we view his Joe through Joan’s eyes, you can fully understand why Joan embraces the playful fool one moment and wants to throw him under a bus the next.

It’s hard to imagine this would be a very good film if we took away Starke, Close, or Pryce. The proof is in the secondary characters. Although Slater is fine as the oily Nathaniel Bone, the rest of the cast is, to be charitable, mediocre. This is especially the case with Lloyd and Irons, each of whom is as wooden as an old growth forest. McGovern does what the script demands, but her role is on the edge of being over the top. There are decided script weaknesses, not the least of which is that Wolitzer has dumbed down Smith College students to get us to the Joan/Joe nuptials. One wonders how Joan could be lured into thinking women shouldn’t write, given that Natalie Babbitt, Sylvia Plath, and Jane Yolen were among the literary lights that attended Smith in the 1950s. (Is it worth mentioning that Meg Wolitzer attended Smith, but transferred after her sophomore year?)

Despite my reservations, you should watch it for three performances as crisp as a handpicked Golden Delicious apple. As for the narrative, you might see its major reveal coming, but it still packs a wallop. My biggest frustration is that this is good film that could have been better. Sound familiar?

Rob Weir