Directed by Bjorn Runge
Starring Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Max Irons
They say that in any relationship, there is the lover and the loved. While the standard scriptural wisdom about marriage idealizes a couple that is "equally yoked," somehow one person ends up pulling more of the weight than the other. In the traditional American marriage, up until the middle of the 20th Century, women were expected to be the "helpmeet" of their husbands: the mistress of the home, the tender of the hearth, the guardian of the children, and an endless source of support, wisdom, comfort and sustenance to their mate. Even in modern love partnerships, a large part of how relationships grow is how the partners shore each other up, keep each other's secrets, and safeguard their egos.
In the opening scenes of The Wife, which is set in the early 1990s, we meet long-married seniors Joan (Glenn Close) and Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) as they turn in for the night in their Connecticut home. Insecure, self-absorbed and somewhat quixotic, Joe is a respected author, shortlisted for the Nobel prize in literature and hoping for a call from Sweden. Practical, even-tempered Joan manages him -- his expectations, his nighttime routine, and after initially resisting finally gives in to his boyish sexual advances. "Imagine me as I was then, young," he says, shimmying himself on top of her.
The next morning, when a call does come in bright and early from the Nobel Committee, Joe instantly asks for his wife to pick up the phone extension so they both can hear the news of his award. After the call he excitedly grabs Joan so they can jump on the mattress in jubilation, until Joan soberly calls the activity to a close and begins to orchestrate everything that must be done in terms of celebrating and getting the family to Sweden for the ceremony. This is her role. She is The Wife.
Joan has been managing every aspect of Joe since she first managed to wedge herself between him and his first wife, when Joe was a college writing professor and she a young student with writing potential, which we discover in flashback. Since then, she has basically managed his writing career: serving as his sounding board, editor, typist and more, even shutting out their young son as they worked on Joe's novels. Joan manages Joe's apparel, his comportment, his health maintenance, his relationships, and his meals, and he praises her and thanks her at every turn. But as the family prepares to go to Sweden for the Nobel festivities, Joan begins to reflect on everything she has sacrificed to support her husband's brilliant career. In doing so, her resentment slowly begins to bubble to the surface and then rapidly comes to a boil once they arrive in Stockholm.
Joan's feelings on the trip are pushed along by all of the pomp, circumstance, and lionizing of her husband; her husband's treatment of their adult son (Max Irons, son of Jeremy Irons), also an aspiring novelist who feels neglected by his parents and belittled by his father; by the probing and badgering of smugly persistent journalist Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater) with a book contract to write a biography about Joe and who threatens to reveal juicy secrets that Joan denies; and finally, by her husband's dalliance with a young Swedish photographer assigned to him. Though Joan has excused and dismissed Joe's many affairs, and denied having a greater role in Joe's writing success than the public knows, in the face of Nathaniel's barbed comments and observances, Joan keeps up her unruffled façade though inside she begins to seethe.
The Wife is an excellent, in-depth study of a marriage, an often painful examination of everything it takes to keep two separate people together, and how after 40 years together the accumulated chinks in the armor of that marriage can bring the whole thing down. It is also about the cycle of pain, sacrifice, elation amd dejection that comes with being a professional writer.
Glenn Close is superb, as usual, playing a woman who on the surface is calm, cool, and collected at all times, and has fooled herself into believing that she has no ambitions of her own, that all of her motives have been selfless, and that her most important role has been to be The Wife. Jonathan Pryce is her equal, playing Joe as a charming but clueless cad who would literally be nothing without his wife and knows it, though he doesn't always show it.
The dramatic denouement may be a bit too tidy a plot turn for some, but Joe's fate is just another, perhaps unintended manifestation of Joan's ability to manage an outcome. Despite everything, Joan loves Joe. The truth is that love isn't easy or easily explainable. There are no perfect people. And no perfect movies, either, though this comes close.
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