Movies don’t often arrive at exactly the right time. The Wife does however, and couldn’t have caught the mood in the air better. In the enlightening hangover of Weinstein and the #MeToo movement, 2018 has been a year with many more female-led movies, as well as igniting changes in industries around the world. The Nobel Prize for Literature isn’t being held this year because a husband of one of the committee members has been accused of sexual misconduct. And this is a relevant point when considering the context of The Wife, even if screenwriter Jane Anderson didn’t mean it to be.
Joan Castleman (Glenn Close) is wife to Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), a revered American writer who receives a call telling him he’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Joan smiles at his side, looking exceedingly proud. But a novelistically named Nathaniel (Christian Slater), a well-meaning journalist sporting a polemical leather jacket, begins to discover the secrets behind Joe’s success – forming the theory that Joan is the real author. This opens up old wounds for Joan, revealing gritted teeth behind her proud smiles.
Joan is like a kettle: quiet at first, but gradually bursts to boiling point. Although every performance in The Wife is intensely watchable, Pryce especially, none of the actors can match Glenn Close and her display of long-repressed fire – spreading with every cocktail conversation where Joe says his wife doesn’t write, or when he ogles his pretty photographer, or when he vents his frustrations about being alone. Joan has played the traditional wife and mother up to this juncture, but talking to Nathaniel makes her realise the injustice of her situation. Ulf Brantås’s camera sticks to her constantly, like her head is tied to the lens, and he always pans back to her. Even during a scene at the beginning where Joe receives the prize-winning phone call, the moment is appropriately commandeered by Joan as she listens on another phone. That’s her moment, not her husband’s, and Close plays it beautifully.
Anderson’s script plays out like a Bergman film, only with more laughs and less death. The little whiffs of existential anxiety are never spoken aloud – Close’s face says it all. However, director Björn Runge tries to intensify the drama by constricting the space and squashing everything together, which makes it feel more like a play than a movie (something Bergman was often able to avoid). And the personal dramas between the secondary characters, especially from their son David (Max Irons), had easy resolutions and weren’t intense enough – despite the close camera angles and emotionally excellent performances.
But The Wife is the sort of riveting writer-drama the world needs right now. The relationship between Joan and Joe is funny as well as heartbreaking, and Anderson is careful not to be too aphoristic when touching on gender disparity. Much of her dialogue is written with a fist in the air and not a cliché in sight. When Joan reveals what’s behind her gritted teeth, it’s hard not to cheer.
The Wife is released in the UK on 28th September 2018
