The Wife

At the beginning of The Wife Joan Castleman (Glenn Close) and her husband Joe (Jonathan Pryce) receive a phone call and learn that Joe has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is 1992, and Joe's work - in Jane Anderson's screenplay of Meg Wolitzer's novel - has apparently been judged both superior to that of the poet Derek Walcott (who actually won the award that year) and in greater need of recognition than early 1990's winners like Toni Morrison and Seamus Heaney. The Wife, directed by Bjorn Runge, is the story of what happens between Joe getting that phone call and picking up his award. Glenn Close is as good as one might expect, giving Joan a sharp intelligence and cutting wit and a sense of always being in caretaker mode. Close also gives Joan the slightest hunch to her back as she moves, and in a film that turns out to be about choices deferred and resentments buried the choice to physicalize Joan's burden was a good one. Anderson's script unfolds on two tracks: Joan, Joe, and their son David (a sullen Max Irons) prepare for the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm while at the same time we see a younger Joan and Joe (Close's daughter Annie Starke and Harry Lloyd) begin their relationship in the late 1950's. Joan is an aspiring writer when she meets Joe (in his class) at Smith College, but The Wife has some curious ideas about women and writing. Joan's early stories show promise, but when Joan is introduced to a female novelist (Elizabeth McGovern) the older woman tells her that there is zero chance any female writer will ever be taken seriously. The next time we see Joan she is doing office work for a publisher just as Joe is beginning his career. The speed with which Joan appears to give up on her ambition doesn't connect with the emotional turmoil that Joan finds herself experiencing in Stockholm, and some late revelations courtesy of a would-be Castleman biographer (Christian Slater) send The Wife lurching into melodrama.

It doesn't help that Runge has little feel for place. Much of The Wife takens place in a series of well-appointed rooms as Joe prepares to receive his award. A film about writing probably needs more visual flair, but Runge's style gives the film the feel of a well-made play. We're told Joe has had affairs, but we see only his flirtation with the photographer (Karin Franz Korlof) who is following him around. Pryce plays Joe as a vain but reasonable man, and if the script had made him a little more of a bastard then Joan's situation might have been thrown into greater relief. Almost everyone in The Wife talks about writing, but no one reads. I've mentioned more real-life writers in this review than the script does. Writing is a notoriously difficult thing to make films about, and here writing is reduced merely to a job that must be done. There's no sense that anyone might take pleasure from writing, or that despite the use of the Nobel as a plot point that writing could be regarded as art. The Wife needed to be less literal, but it winds up wasting good performances by Close and Pryce in a story that badly needed another draft.