Review by © Jane Freebury
She warns her husband there are crumbs in his beard, reminds him to take his medication, and is diplomatic towards intrusive journalists. Joe Castleman, played with ease by Jonathan Pryce, is a famous writer and as such he is allowed to be distracted from minor chores, besides his wife is a woman who has made a career out of smoothing his way.
Castleman is on the point of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He will travel to Stockholm with wife Joan (Glenn Close) and son David (Max Irons) who is also a writer and has just had his first book published.
The film is specific about the year in which it is set. It is a quarter of a century ago. A long or a short time in feminism, depending on your perspective. There weren’t many young fathers to be seen pushing strollers through the streets back then.
The Wife is based on a recent novel but it is such a throwback to the 1950s that the filmmakers at least had the sense to put a woman like Glenn Close in the role. She makes this odd material work.
There is no doubt about the strength that Close brings to her characters on screen. Especially since the jilted lover in Fatal Attraction in 1987, she has brought extra flintiness to her roles like the leader of a prison camp choir in Paradise Road, as Hamlet’s mother 1990 and as the evil Cruella in 101 Dalmatians.
Working against type, Close finds herself here in the role of a wifely wife who has spent a lifetime nurturing her husband’s career, ostensibly doing the editing. In flashbacks to her younger self, as student and new wife to the ambitious young professor of creative writing, Joan is played by Close’s own daughter, Annie Stark.
Like Starke, young Max Irons, son of Jeremy, must have a take of his own on being the son of a famous actor.
From early in her marriage, Joan has learned to look the other way during Joe’s affairs. In Stockholm the aging lothario is at it yet again, with an attractive young minder.
The thing is, the film tries to convince us, that Joan is both doormat and indispensable to Joe’s career. The circumstances beggar belief. A nosy journalist, Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), suspects the truth and wants to write Castleman’s biography, but he keeps getting the brush off, from both Joe and Joan.
The pact between this husband and wife is implausible, impossible to believe, and certainly doesn’t reflect the choices contemporary women are likely to make. It is inconceivable that a self-respecting woman would do what Joan has done, and yet Close gives it all she’s got, in a battened down, nuanced way, and it is this that makes The Wife worth watching.
3 Stars
Screening at Dendy Canberra Centre, Palace Electric in New Acton, and Event Cinema, Manuka
Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle