Review of The Wife (2017) by Bill M — 11 Sep 2018

Spoilers ahead. Critics rave about this film for two reasons: 1, they're raving mad; 2, in the #MeToo era, attitudes are hardening into groupthink, and critics typically go along with political correctness-which, apart from terrific acting, is all this boring, noisy, claustrophobic and out-of-date (again with the embittered wife?) stinker has going for it.

Boring because it's endless talk. Noisy? It recalls Queen Victoria's comment on Gladstone: "he speaks to me as if I was a public meeting." People are constantly shouting here, and in sets that seem to have terrible acoustics.

Then there's the deafening score. Claustrophobic? Everything happens indoors (and if it moves outdoors it's only to move into a car). Dated? It's another resentful-wife tale of lost identity.

So here's the story: Young writing hopefuls fall in love: student Joan and professor Joe. After breaking up his marriage the two pair up, she on the wife/mommy track, he on the great American novelist track, only to be derailed because his novel stinks.

Really stinks. Birds won't fly over it. After much agony, he agrees to let her "fix" it, and she does. Taking only the facts of his weary trope (again with "my Jewish family"? Oi!), she replaces his wooden characters and stilted dialogue with heart and soul and life, and (mirabile dictu!) the revision is a boffo hit.

Realizing that "team writing' is their future, they divvy it up like so: he'll be the house husband, kid minder, cook and provider of plot material; she'll be Rumpelstiltskin, spinning dross into gold, but only Joe is credited.

He does the book-signings, the tours, the great-author interviews, the relentless philandering. For 40 years they go one, she getting an easy, prosperous life in return for anonymity. But then Joe wins the Nobel Prize, kindling in Joan long-buried angst of the (do I have to spell it out for you?) "What about my career?" and "I coulda been a contenda" variety.

Fanning her flames is Nathaniel Bone, a slimy would-be biographer of Joe and a truly cringe-making character on his best day. Give him credit though: he has doggedly unearthed the truth of the Joan-Joe partnership, and all he needs is her confirmation.

In Stockholm, in an over-drinks tête-à-tête with Joan he tries oleaginously to get it. He fails at that but succeeds in threatening the stability of my stomach. OK, off we go to the Nobel Prize grand dinner, and since the director of this movie, Björn Runge, is a Swede, we are entitled to believe that the dinner is accurately represented.

Thus my question: who knew a Nobel Prize dinner was exactly like Gala Night on a Carnival cruiseliner? More high-volume tantrums follow until Joe has a heart attack and keels over, dead as a smelt. One the flight home, the slimy Nathaniel is warned by Joan: write a single bad thing about Joe and I'll take you to court, and he slinks off, crushed.

Who's kidding whom here? The bio of a famous author, even a freshly dead Nobel winner, might sell a piddling few thousand copies. Somehow the writer of this epic, who can't tell the difference between 'implied' and 'inferred,' seems unaware that a juicy scandal + lawsuit would shoot sales through the roof.

Similarly unreal: the scene in which Linnea, the toothsome young lens-hen assigned to covering Joe, is this-close to heading sackward with him until he has to take his heart pill. OK, she might well want a Nobelist as a notch on her garter belt-but when 15 minutes before he almost collapsed in front of her? All in all, the acting's great, the story stinks and Glenn Close ought to ask her dentist about whitening.