Close’s powerhouse performance elevates marital melodrama
What sacrifices are acceptable for the sake of art? For marriage? Swedish director Björn Runge explores these questions in his new film The Wife, which, if nothing else, may become the film most remembered for netting six-time Academy Award nominee Glenn Close her first Oscar. Close’s performance is the best reason to see the picture, which manages to thoughtfully present serious themes while teetering on the edge of melodrama.
Adapted by screenwriter Jane Anderson (Olive Kitteridge) from Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel of the same name, The Wife tells the story of long married Joe (Jonathan Pryce) and Joan Castleman (Close). The pair meet when Joan is a young writing student at Smith College in the late 1950s; Joan is then-Professor Castleman’s student, in one of the movie’s more clichéd tropes. Married to another at the time, the young professor and his protégée begin an affair that breaks up his marriage and young family, but goes on to produce a longer marriage and two more children. The picture jumps back and forth in time, as we move from watching the younger Castlemans’ courtship (Harry Lloyd and Annie Starke, Close’s real life daughter, play the young Joe and Joan) to the present day setting of the early ‘90s, in which the now successful and famous writer Joe has just learned he’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
That early scene, in which Joe receives the call that he’s won the Prize, sets the tone for the entire film; watch Joan’s face as she listens silently on the extension, alone in a room separate from her husband, hearing that Joe has won the award. Walt Whitman famously wrote that we contain multitudes, and nowhere has this sentiment been more effectively conveyed than in Close’s performance here.
Quiet and self-effacing, Joan is the seemingly perfect doting wife to Pryce’s arrogant, brash, and needy husband. She reminds him to take his pills, keeps track of his reading glasses, and holds his coat while he mingles with colleagues. Upon arriving in Stockholm for the Nobel ceremony, a hotel staffer tells Joan “shopping and beauty treatments” can be arranged for her while Joe is busy with his Nobel ceremony obligations. Joan just smiles politely, and we come to understand, as we watch her story unfold, that this sort of condescending, prevalent sexism has followed Joan her whole life.
The irony, of course, is that Joan is a talented writer in her own right; in the Mad Men-esque era in which she comes up, she is, of course, never encouraged to pursue her own ambitions or to have her own career, but only to be the supportive wife and mother who lives to foster her husband’s success. But, as we can tell from Joan’s face in that early phone call scene — as well as in a similar, later scene, in which Joe receives the Prize on stage as Joan watches from the audience, again with an inscrutable look on her face — there is much more to Joan, her marriage, and her husband’s success than we initially are led to believe.
We do get some hints all may not be right with this marital dynamic, both in scenes with the Castlemans’ adult son David (Max Irons, excellent in a somewhat thankless role), a struggling writer desperate for his father’s approval, and in those with a perceptive and persistent biographer (Christian Slater, always a welcome presence), who correctly senses that the tight-lipped Joan probably has more to say about her husband than she lets on.
On the surface, then, Runge’s film may seem like merely a soapy melodrama, in which we are flies on the wall witnessing one family’s dysfunction, but beneath the angst, the recriminations, and the fights (of which there are many — including a no holds barred confrontation between Joan and Joe that rivals Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf), there is a very smart, tightly constructed story that touches on marriage, family, art, and sexism. Wolitzer’s book — and now Runge’s film — is fundamentally about how women are made to feel small by men, even when perhaps the opposite may be true. Not always easy to watch, the film serves as a sharp reminder of how women’s talent has too often been quashed in favor of men’s, and the results can be devastating.
Anderson’s screenplay is weighty, and it’s a testament to Close that she’s able to convey so much unstated, simmering emotion with just flickers of facial expressions. Much has been made about the recent addition of an Oscar for Best Popular Film; how about one for Best Non-Verbal Facial Acting? The engraver can etch Close’s name on that statuette today.
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The Wife opens today at Landmark’s Embarcadero theater, with a wider Bay Area expansion to follow on August 31st.
