This Roses has jokes, but no thorns.
Comedies are making a noisy return to theaters this year! With One of Them Days, The Naked Gun, and Freakier Friday successfully attracting audiences, and Spinal Tap II and Good Fortune waiting in the wings, 2025 could be a turning point for the comedy genre’s decade-long theatrical absence. The Roses aims to continue the trend. The Roses comes from director Jay Roach (Austin Powers; Meet the Parents) and is based on the novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler and the subsequent 1989 film adaptation starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. In a plea for wider audience approval, The Roses has declawed the source material in favor of a softer, mostly harmless black comedy. If not for the winning duo at its center, The Roses would wilt under the strains of its vignette-styled antics, but fortunately has the chemistry and enough laughs to withstand its structural shortcomings.
From an incredibly charming “meet cute” to a peaceful California suburban life with two kids, Ivy (Olivia Colman) and Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) have crafted a life of comfort. Their respective careers are a little rough around the edges, however, with Theo’s architecture path precariously rocketing him to fame, while Ivy’s humdrum coastal seafood restaurant averages only a handful of customers (if any at all) each day. When Ivy and Theo’s careers take a sudden one-eighty, the cracks in their relationship begin to show, and an escalating sequence of contentious mind games and physical confrontations take their tranquil coexistence to the brink of violent destruction.
The various narrative supplements that fill out The Roses’ story – the couple’s friends, their children, Ivy’s restaurant workers, the couple’s therapist – feel tacked on. As effective as comedians Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, Jamie Demetriou, and Zoë Chao, who all play Theo and Ivy’s close friends, are at delivering awkward jokes, they matter very little to the plot. The same goes for the therapist, restaurant workers, and a great cameo in the part of Ivy’s lawyer, who are all incredibly funny in their respective scenes but don’t otherwise contribute anything further. The Rose children, though only utilized sporadically, disappearing and appearing only when the film needs to establish another emotional pivot point for their parents, are at least contributing emotional factors in the bubbling tensions between Ivy and Theo. Luckily the strength of the film’s central artery, the Ivy and Theo relationship, and their superb actor chemistry, is enough to carry the weight of these additions without being dragged down.
Colman and Cumberbatch are a match made in heaven. Who knew these two could be so winning together, with Colman’s charming sarcasm and Cumberbatch’s sly dryness playing brilliantly off each other. They’re so good together, the film seems reluctant to arrive at the breaking point of their butting heads, seemingly more interested in the Roses taking on the world together rather than the Roses taking on each other. The Roses suffers most from this tonal reluctance. The less-sinister plot of The Roses, when compared to the book and 1989 film, isn’t an inherently bad thing, but committing to a darker tone may have helped with the new film’s otherwise sidelined exploration of power dynamics and materialism.
The morbidly satirical ebbs and flows of the Roses relationship in The War of the Roses highlight the obsessive nature of material greed and career success. The book and 1989 film are both overly cynical. The Roses is less cynical. The new film asks us to laugh at the absurdist nature of accumulated wealth and the insecurities associated with pride. The Roses also asks us to idealize romance and chuckle when irrelevant squabbles disrupt it. What the new film doesn’t ask us to do, and what the book and previous film excelled at, was making us uncomfortable and unnerved by the couple’s violent escalation. Laughing is one thing, but feeling discomfort is another, and the latter is an ingredient that can take comedy to another level. Some discomfort could’ve made The Roses a devilishly funny satire rather than a charming comedy.
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The Roses opens in theaters on Friday, August 29th.
