THE WIFE
Director: Bjorn Runge
Cert. 15. 1hr 40mins
It is a cliché of acceptance speeches of honours awarded to a man that he acknowledges the contribution of his wife, without whom, etc.
He might be quite sincere in saying: ‘I could not have done this without her.’ But what if that were true in a greater and more literal sense than anyone realised. What if, in fact it was she, not he, who had done the work?
The eponymous wife, Joan Castleman (played immaculately by Glenn Close) stands by coiffed and smiling in a good wool coat, while her husband Joseph (Jonathan Pryce) is feted and adored. Her exterior mask becomes more brittle as they travel to Stockholm where he will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her longsuffering forbearance is stretched to the limit as flashbacks reveal the ego and philandering of the man she married. There is some explanation, which stretches credibility somewhat, of how they ever got into this state of affairs whereby she was writing the novels and he was editing them and having them published under his name.
Colluding in a lie
The fact is that the Castlemans have colluded in living a lie, even in front of their family and closest friends. They are accompanied on the Stockholm trip by their angry young man of a son, who also aspires to write. And they are also stalked by Castleman’s would-be biographer, an annoying, intrusive bloodhound whose creepy insinuations become pivotal to the plot.
The film is more dialogue than action and the dialogue is unpleasantly ridden with expletives, especially between husband and wife. This film is an anatomy and dismembering of a marriage.
It is almost certain that Glenn Close will, at the very least, get an Oscar nomination for her superbly nuanced performance, which is distinctly on-message: clever down-trodden wife, exploited and abused by the selfish lesser species which is the male. It is a storyline for our times: feminists will love it; those who dissent or are bored with this now-tired theme will not dare to say so.
The irony is that the film so nearly demonstrates what a marriage should and could be – a sharing of a life’s work – and then turns it on itself. Because despite the disclaimer by the young Castleman, that writers write because they must, not for recognition, each of the egos in this marriage wants recognition and finds it impossible to genuinely participate in the success of the other. And, in the universally accepted secular mindset, only publicly recognised work has any validity.
As lies and resentments layer up, things come to a climax on the night of the ceremony itself. There is pathos, tragedy and too much swearing. While the wife herself evokes our sympathy, the discerning viewer will not miss the anti-marriage polemic which is the bitter heart of this film.
