MA 15+, 105 minutes
4 Stars
Review by © Jane Freebury
There are so many aspects to a movie that can win us over. The way it looks, its musical score, the actors’ performances, or it might be the seductive power of all dimensions that work brilliantly together. It isn’t often these days that the script, the spoken word, leaps out at you in the way that it does here from the start.
The Roses, directed by Jay Roach, who had such success with Meet the Parents, Bombshell and Austin Powers, is the diary of a marriage breakdown with Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch as the warring couple. It is hard to imagine another pair of actors looking so convincing as partners who are on the brink of divorce yet still love each other.
This is comedy that is closer to the bone for Roach, a move into the darker territory of intimate relations. It is based on a screenplay by Australian, Tony McNamara, who has made his mark as screenwriter in the international industry.
A state of domestic bliss underwritten by Ivy’s wonderful cooking
The Roses live in sunny, beach-side California. A brash and colourful scene where the British couple, Ivy (Colman), an aspiring chef, and Theo (Cumberbatch), an architect, have established a new home and enjoy an affluent lifestyle. They live with their two children in a state of domestic bliss, underwritten by Ivy’s wonderful cooking.
Until one evening a freak storm demolishes the maritime museum building, complete with sails, that Theo has designed. The same wild weather event sends motorists seeking shelter, off-piste and in the direction of Ivy’s new and hopelessly unsuccessful seafood resto. The crowd includes an influential food critic who is smitten with Ivy’s cuisine.
It is a watershed moment that flips the scales on the Roses’ relationship. Ivy opens a chain of restaurants along the West Coast and appears on the covers of lifestyle magazines, while Theo, blacklisted for his spectacular design failure, stays home to look after the kids.
After years under Theo’s strict fitness regimen, the twins Hatty and Roy, are aiming for sports scholarships and these will take them away from home. With Delaney Quinn and Ollie Robinson playing the younger children, and Hala Finley and Wells Rappaport playing the older, the kids have been drifting closer to their dad. This development, and the stress on the marriage created by the classic imbalance in workloads with gender roles reversed, brings things to a crunch. An early scene at a marriage guidance counsellor sets the tone, as Ivy and Theo insult each other and spar, then end up sending up the quality of the professional advice.
Theo is not a cad, nor is Ivy a bitch. They are more attractive and relatable personalities than the couple in The War of the Roses of 1989 with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, a black comedy more vicious than this. Theo encouraged Ivy to revive her culinary genius by launching a restaurant on a part-time basis, making the initial investment. For her part, Ivy also invested in her husband recovering his reputation by funding a fabulous new build, their new home overlooking the ocean. They seem to like each other, mostly, despite some very rude outbursts, even in front of the guests.
A battle of the sexes as good as it gets, like a classic from the heyday of screwball comedy
The witty, sizzling dialogue is as good as it gets. At least as good as the wise-cracking screwball classic comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, battles of the sexes that once graced stars like Kate Hepburn, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.
We certainly remember with acute discomfort the original Scenes from a Marriage, Ingmar Bergman’s excoriating classic with Liv Ullmann, recently adapted for TV. And Marriage Story with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson. Neither of those films is a barrel of laughs, but The Roses is helmed by a director known for his comedic flair, and the screenplay the work of a writer whose brilliant off-kilter humour has underpinned outstanding films like The Favourite and Poor Things both directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
Planting two expat Brits in California has opened a world of satirical possibilities on American behaviour and mores. Two of the Roses’ good friends, an unhappily married couple played by actors Kate McKinnon and Andy Samberg, deliver some toe-curling lines, ripe for satire, and they’re not the only characters who get a serve. It might account for the less-than-enthusiastic response that The Roses seems to be getting over there.
Also published on Rotten Tomatoes