From The Lost Weekend and Some Came Running to Finding Forrester and Started Out in the Evening, movies about writers often don’t know a damn thing about writing or writers. They assume poets and novelists say plummy things, writing sentences with autobiographical correlatives. Leaden and often ridiculous, The Wife is among the worst of the bunch, despite committed work by Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce.
In the first scene, set in 1992, renowned novelist Joe Castleman (Pryce) canoodles against reluctant wife Joan (Close) after eating a midnight snack. This establishes his sex drive and heart condition, two facts that director Björn Runge aims at viewers throughout at gunpoint. Then in the pre-dawn hours the phone rings: Joe has won the Nobel Prize. They celebrate together: Joe insists on Joan’s picking up the phone, and they bounce up and down on the bed like children staying at Grandma’s. Although pregnant daughter Susannah (Alix Wilton Regan) can’t make the trip to Stockholm, son David (Max Irons) does, in large part so he can get the praise he needs from Joe for writing a short story.
Adapting Meg Wolitzer’s novel, Runge and screenwriter Jane Anderson have set up a scenario in which wife and children are supporting characters in Joe Castleman’s world. He affects humility, praises Joan as the light of his life and so on while she and David stoke their resentments in stricken closeups. Flashbacks inform the audience that Joan, a student at Smith College, herself showed promise as a writer; Joe, a young English professor (played by a foppish Harry Lloyd), praises her story “The Faculty Wife,” about — guess what — the resentments of the title character, married to an egomaniac and womanizer. Time hasn’t mitigated Joe’s incessant pandering, though; in Stockholm he issues no protests when a young photographer flirts with him. Meanwhile Joan entertains a flirtation of her own with the absurdly named Nathaniel Bone, a biographer on the quest for what Henry James called the figure in the carpet and hoping that after a few cigarettes and vodkas Joan will show him the thread.
Slater looks embarrassed saying Anderson’s failed approximations of how lettered men and women talk. But there are other embarrassments in The Wife to come. Whenever the film sticks to limning the decades of an envy that has nevertheless, in Proustian fashion, acted as an aphrodisiac on the relationship, The Wife is okay. If instead the movie had followed a struggling novelist and the demands of her shrill husband, we would’ve had a rare glimpse into women creating art. Then the movie takes a turn into Barton Fink Land, collapsing into the absurd. Runge can’t dramatize material that requires the characters to turn into gorgons, and Close, waging a losing battle to keep underplaying, is the biggest victim. Best at projecting a frosty hauteur, Close thinks she’s in Dangerous Liasions and she’s doing the Marquise de Merteuil again. Irons, hair in stringy bangs over his face in the costume designers’ idea of Poppy Bush Interzone cool, is awful, but the role, a continuous wheeze, is unplayable.
As the outrages pile up and Nathaniel’s discoveries blunt the force of Jane’s blandishments, The Wife descends into a kind of madness. Pictures like this, with their tony set design and archness of manner, are a menace. They contribute to the general idea that readers have to “relate” to fiction; that to “relate” fiction writers must construct a narrative about the sources of their material. I’ve never heard of a writer sitting down with a piece of paper and thinking, “I just had a fight with my husband; I’m going to write a story about it.” Fiction isn’t autobiography; fiction is alchemy. By the end of The Wife Joe is exposed as a fraud. So is The Wife.
GRADE: C
Humanizing The Vacuum 