The Wife – coming to Thame Cinema 4 All

USA 2018, 100 minutes, 15 certificate
Directed by Bjorn Runge, starring Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Max Irons

IN her acceptance speech for her Best Actress Oscar last weekend, Olivia Colman expressed regret that she was in competition against Glenn Close, one of her screen idols, who was up for her seventh Best Actress nomination for her role in The Wife. And it is one of the most exceptional performances of Close’s long and exceptional career.

In the film, she plays Joan Castleman, wife of celebrated man of letters, Joseph (Pryce). As the film opens, we learn that Joseph has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The couple travel to Stockholm for the award ceremony, but what should be a celebration is instead a crisis point for Joan: Joseph is vain, preening, needy, repeatedly rejoicing to others that he couldn’t have done it without her; that fortunately for him she has no interest in writing.

He flagrantly chases after younger women (infidelity is evidently a recurring feature of the marriage) and tortures their beloved son, Max, (Irons) with faint praise for his own writing efforts. And yet Joan is perennially and stoicly on hand, ensuring that he has taken his pills, that he has eaten, that everything is in its place. But she is also evidently suppressing considerable rage and frustration. As events unfold, Joan is forced to reappraise her life and her marriage, her own thwarted literary ambitions, and the legacies of her decades-long selfless dedication to her husband’s work and career – a process perhaps catalysed by the insistent enquiries of Slater’s Nathaniel, a creepy journo and wannabe biographer of Joseph, who has joined the Nobel bandwagon.

The story moves between past and present, going back to their meeting at college in the 1950s, when Joan was also a conspicuously gifted aspiring writer. Close is outstanding as a complex and dignified woman grappling with long suppressed emotions, with regret and anguish, with love and loathing. Pryce, too, is reliably excellent as the insufferable narcissist Joseph. View the trailer HERE.