The Wife
(Sweden/UK/USA, 100 min.)
Dir. Björn Runge, Writ. Jane Anderson
Starring: Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Max
Irons, Annie Stark, Harry Lloyd
It’s hard to imagine a better showcase for Glenn Close’s
talents than The Big Chill, Fatal Attraction, The World According to Garp, Dangerous
Liaisons, or Damages, but The Wife might be the finest example of
her strength as an actress. That might be the case because The Big Chill, Fatal
Attraction, The World According to
Garp, Dangerous Liaisons, or Damages are all great pieces of film and
television. The Wife, unfortunately,
is not a good film, but Glenn Close is great in it. She’s reason alone to see
the film as she elevates every scene in which she appears with subdued,
repressed rage. Close’s performance in The
Wife is a masterclass in subtle, nuanced acting.
Beneath the happy surface, however, brews resentment. The Wife—and this is where the film often
falters—flashes back to the past and explores the early courtship of Joan and
Joe, played by Annie Stark (Close’s daughter) and Harry Lloyd (no relation).
Joan is at a girls’ college with dreams of becoming a writer and Joe, her
dashing professor, thinks she’s pretty good. Cut to a clumsy affair and a few
readings, and Joan’s talent is more than apparent. However, as a boozy alumnus
(Elizabeth McGovern) tells her, there’s no future for women in writing. It’s a man’s
world then just as, sadly, it still is now as mastheads and publishing houses
have mostly males in top positions deciding which voices and stories are worthy
of publication.
The Wife adapts
the novel of the same name by Meg Wolitzer (Surrender,
Dorothy), which isn’t an especially great book to begin with but has a
little more finesse in the way it folds the past and present. There’s a lot of
great material that doesn’t make the cut (an inevitability in adaptation), like
Joe’s boorish resentment of a colleague who survived the Holocaust and had hard
pain to channel into literature or the other, more humorous story of the walnut
that inspired the book that launched Joe’s career. (It’s a great scene where
Joe’s ex-wife confronts Joan and hurls a walnut at her forehead, branding her
with a nut-sized scarlet letter.) Much of what Anderson omits in the adaptation
are the nuggets that speak to Joan and Joe’s respective strengths and
weaknesses as both writers and people. Although the one fine stroke of Jane
Anderson’s adaptation is the addition of a scene of Joe’s infidelity, betrayed
by a walnut that Joan discovers just as she’s ready to break, that nicely
speaks to how little he knows of the books that carry his name.
It’s not that the past scenes of The Wife are especially bad—actually, some of them are quite good
as Stark introduces herself as a natural performer. There’s just a bluntness to
function of these scenes within the film. They don’t give the audience much
credit. They just lay out everything that Close reveals so masterfully and
imperceptibly behind her feigned pride for Joe.
There’s one scene in particular that demonstrates how much
Close does with this role and how sometimes the best delivery for any artist to
do more with less. The scene comes just over midway in the film when Joe’s
wannabe biographer (Christian Slater) nags Joan into having a drink with him
and he tries to tease out a confession about her literary prowess. Close simply
sits there and smiles with a slightly boozy twinkle in Joan’s eye. There is so
much going on behind Joan’s tightly composed mask: pride, pain, resentment,
jealousy, and a yearning to be recognized for what she truly is. It’s in this
scene that Close is at her best as she represses moments that might have
inspired broad strokes from other stars. (And when Close goes big in the final
scenes, her performance is the culmination of simmering rage that’s been
building throughout the film.) Joan, a true writer, prefers to observe and
listen rather than speak. Her best work isn’t creating characters in the page, it’s
in the role she writes for herself: a woman with far more complexity than any
man could imagine.
The Wife is now playing in limited release.