The Wife
Björn L Runge (2017)
Shortly before he suffers a fatal heart attack in the closing stages of The Wife, Joseph (Joe) Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) and his wife Joan (Glenn Close) have a home-truths showdown. He asks her, ‘If I’m such an insensitive, untalented fucking piece of shit, why the hell did you marry me?’ The film’s audience has been wondering this too, for even longer than we’ve waited for the coronary that’s coming from the moment Joe announces he’s in great health, ‘give or take the odd bypass surgery’. We’ve been spending time with the Castlemans in Stockholm, where Joe is receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. We’ve also seen flashbacks to the beginnings of their life together, more than thirty years ago, when Joan (Annie Starke) was an English student at Smith College and Joe (Harry Lloyd) an academic there, as charmless then as he is now. Joan’s answer to her husband’s anguished question is ‘I don’t know’ – a bit disappointing but comical too. She speaks not just for herself but also for The Wife‘s writer Jane Anderson, whose screenplay is adapted from a 2003 novel by Meg Wolitzer.
The film, set in 1992, begins at the Castlemans’ home in Connecticut. In the early hours of the morning, Joe receives a phone call from Sweden with news of his Nobel Prize. (The actual winner in the year in question was Derek Walcott.) Within the first five minutes, The Wife‘s able lead actors convey that Joe is a high-handed narcissist and Joan is keeping uncomfortable thoughts and feelings to herself. For the next forty-five minutes (nearly half the film), revelation of what’s causing those thoughts and feelings is delayed – without Jane Anderson or the Swedish director Björn Runge supplying much incident or character development to deflect our awareness of being kept artificially in suspense. Then the melodramatic overcompensation begins.
The reason why Joe is an untalented etc etc and for Joan’s discontent is that she, not he, is the author of all ‘his’ novels. The first definite mention of this comes on the second day of their visit to Sweden in a conversation between Joan and Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater, who overacts), a muckraking writer who wants to be Joe’s biographer. Bone refers to evidence in Smith archives of Joan’s writing talents (how such evidence comes to be there is unclear). The mature Castleman style, says Bone, is prefigured not in Joe’s juvenilia but in Joan’s. It’s not long before a flashback to the late 1950s confirms the truth. Joe gives Joan his manuscript to read; she tells him what’s wrong with it (a lot); he retorts angrily that they’ve no future together. Trying to placate him, Joan says she knows how to fix things, and does so. Within a few screen seconds, the novel has been accepted for publication. The euphoric young couple jump about together on their bed, repeating as a childish chant, ‘We’re gonna be published, we’re gonna be published!’ Now we know why, at the start of the film – when the older Castlemans went into the same routine but with Joe chanting ‘I’ve won the Nobel, I’ve won the Nobel!’ – Joan quickly made her excuses and got off the bed.
If Nathaniel Bone’s remarks are the first explicit reference to the literary fraud that’s been going on for decades, they’re not the first implicit signal of it. When the Castlemans, with their son David (Max Irons), arrive in their luxurious hotel suite in Stockholm, there’s a set of the prospective Nobel laureate’s collected works on display, with a note waggishly signed in the name of a character from one of the novels. Joe’s failure to recognise the name introduces the film’s inane depiction of the great writer as charlatan. He may have persistently refused to authorise Bone to write his biography but there’s no suggestion Joe has declined to discuss his work in public: you wonder how he’s fared in interviews if he doesn’t even know who his characters are. Even better is a flashback where Joan is working on one of the novels, Joe queries something she’s written and she patiently explains to him why it has to be that way and will work. You’d never guess that Joe was a Smith College professor of English literature. He might as well be a chartered accountant masquerading as a novelist[1].
The film is so intent on demonising Joe that its own storytelling is careless and its attitude effectively philistine. There’s no hint – beyond the Nobel committee’s vague eulogy of a writer who has radically changed the novel form and so on – of the qualities that have made Joe internationally celebrated. When Joan first takes his ropy manuscript in hand, she says that he’s got great ideas she could never come up with, that she’s a mere stylist. We’ve no idea whether there’s truth in this or whether self-deprecating Joan is saying it just to console Joe. Björn Runge and Jane Anderson leave it at that: to them, Joe is a serial adulterer and thoroughgoing bull-shitter, just as Joan is nothing more than an exceptionally ill-used wife. The moment Runge and Anderson must be proudest of comes when, while Joan is having her crucial conversation with Nathaniel Bone, Joe is in their hotel suite with the glamorous young woman (Karin Franz Körlof) assigned as his personal photographer for the Nobel ballyhoo. He tries (a) to seduce her and (b) to pass off the closing lines of James Joyce’s The Dead as his own: two deceits for the price of one (though he has to abandon the seduction when it’s time to take his heart tablet). Joe quotes the same Joyce lines in the first Smith College flashback but on that occasion attributes them: there’s nothing to suggest he also pulled wool over eyes to get himself an academic career. He’s given no credit for that, however. Runge and Anderson seem to take the view that those who can do, those who can’t teach.
In their climactic bust-up, Joe reminds Joan in injured tones that, while she was writing Nobel-prize-winning novels, he was busy cooking, cleaning and looking after their two children. Joe is not only a ratbag but practically clueless – he relies on his wife for everything. You naturally deride and dismiss what he says but is it meant to be true? Joan doesn’t dispute it. If it’s true, though, didn’t the children notice? Once he’s been tipped off by Bone, David accuses his father – just as Joe and Joan are about to set off for the Nobel ceremony – and says he often wondered, when he was growing up, why his mother ‘was always in there with you with the door shut’. Nothing, however, about his father doing a meal. The Wife is thought-provoking to the extent that you come out of the cinema asking yourself who really did feed the Castleman children. The bad feeling between David and Joe is so emphatically established in the early scenes in America (the son has written a short story the father hasn’t got round to reading yet) that it’s briefly puzzling as to why David comes along on the Stockholm trip. You soon realise there has to be someone there to argue with Joe and give him enough rope to hang himself (repeatedly). After all, Joan will be keeping her counsel for some time yet.
The Castlemans’ daughter (Alix Wilton Regan) isn’t with them in Sweden. She’s expecting her parents’ first grandchild and – guess what? – she gives birth on the day of the Nobel ceremony. What’s more, her phone call comes just as Joan and Joe are embarking on a mega-row, and gives them a pretext for deferring it to a time more convenient to Björn Runge. This is immediately after Joe gets his award, by which stage the melodrama is in overdrive. After seething through the prize-giving, Joan storms out of the ceremonial dinner; she and Joe bitch at each other in their car back to the hotel; he furiously offers her his Nobel medal and, when she ignores him, chucks it out of the car window (though he quickly retrieves it from the street). Then the big bust-up: Joan tells Joe their marriage is over. Then the heart attack and it really is. For reasons unclear, the camera concentrates on Jonathan Pryce during Joe’s death scene; even though you feel by now you’ve been watching Glenn Close’s face for ever, it’s frustrating not to see it as the wife tells her expiring husband that she loves him.
Close shows impressive technical control, making especially good use of the well-known ability of the white, middle-class American woman to smile with her mouth but not her eyes. Although viewers of the film can see that Joan Castleman is deeply unhappy, the face she presents in public wouldn’t arouse the suspicions of the glad-handing Nobel officials et al. Close thus avoids the error of her portrait of the title character in Albert Nobbs, whose determined efforts to avoid attention she made excessively eye-catching. Even so, if, as widely predicted, The Wife lands Glenn Close her long-awaited first Academy Award (after six nominations without winning), it will be one of those Oscars that recognises distinguished long service rather than an individual performance: the role she’s playing is too limited and the movie too preposterous for it to be otherwise. Seventy when the film was shot, Close, though she still looks good, is arguably a few years too old for a woman presumably in her late fifties. Even if this isn’t a problem, the lack of age difference between Joan and Joe is – both in the late 1950s and the early 1990s. Jonathan Pryce is actually the same age as Glenn Close and that’s how they seem. Although Annie Starke (Close’s daughter) is five years Harry Lloyd’s junior, the latter passes for younger than his thirty-five years. That makes Joe an improbably young-looking tenured professor and, even though he has a first wife and a child when he and Joan first meet, weakens the master-pupil dynamic that is fertile ground for their future relationship.
The Wife first screened at the Toronto festival in 2017: was it planned from the outset or a commercial necessity to delay its appearance in cinemas by the best part of a year? (It opened on limited release in the US in mid-August 2018.) The #MeToo momentum of the intervening months has given a film like this – exploitative male villain, suffering-in-silence heroine – an impetus it would have lacked a year ago. (Tim Burton’s Big Eyes (2014), which dramatised a real-life case analogous to the story Björn Runge tells, was no great shakes but it was a lot better than The Wife. You’re bound to wonder, in retrospect, if Burton’s film failed thanks to bad timing more than anything else.) As a bonus, there will be no Nobel Prize in Literature award in 2018, thanks to a scandal with a major sexual misconduct element, centred on the husband of one of the Swedish Academy board members.
Against this background, it’s something of an irony that the role of Joan Castleman is underwritten: The Wife hardly attempts to penetrate her self-disciplined façade. On the plane back to America from Sweden, Nathaniel Bone comes to offer Joan his condolences and to renew his pitch for writing a book. She calmly tells Bone that if he does anything to undermine her late husband’s reputation, she will sue him. Is Joan so accustomed to the role of dutiful companion to Joe that, after speaking her mind at long last, she prefers to resume normal service instead of daring to become a celebrity herself? Would it be adding insult to injury for her now to risk being characterised as a partner in fraud and expected to explain herself and Joe? We don’t know and the film-makers don’t care. All that matters is that he done her wrong. Some aspects of Nobel protocol, at least in Björn Runge’s version of them, provide occasional light relief. Jocelyn Pook’s seriously serious music is a more apt reflection of how this poor but pompous film sees itself.
3 October 2018
[1] Or a supermarket worker … it was an amusing coincidence to see The Wife just a few days after Morvern Callar.