The Roses
Jay Roach (2025)
Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses was a box-office hit in 1989. When it turned up on television a few years later, half an hour was enough for me. I saw through Jay Roach’s remake but The Roses, though it runs only 105 minutes, was an endurance test: the film is pacy and slick but almost intolerably pleased with itself. Like its predecessor, this is not just a comedy but a ‘satirical black comedy’ (Wikipedia) – and a flagrant example of how overused those two adjectives are. The breakdown of a marriage is hardly a taboo subject or one that it’s daring to treat comically. For satirical, simply read misanthropic. The warring middle-class American couple played thirty-five years ago by Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, are now warring British expats in California, in the persons of Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch. The Roses reminds us that Colman is a fine comedy performer and confirms that, as already suspected, Cumberbatch isn’t. Yet the film’s style and tone eventually disadvantage her more than him.
In the source material, Warren Adler’s 1981 novel, Jonathan and Barbara Rose are an affluent Washington DC couple. He’s a high-flying lawyer. She, after years as a homemaker and caring for the couple’s two children, is developing a successful gourmet catering business. When Jonathan suffers a heart attack, Barbara realises she wouldn’t have cared if he’d died, tells him so, and they start divorce proceedings. He offers her a fifty-fifty deal on their house; she insists on the whole property because it’s she who made the home what it is. In DeVito’s film, it’s pretty much the same except that Jonathan has become Oliver and, in hospital after his heart attack, writes Barbara an I-owe-you-everything note. Although it’s only the house – none of their other assets – that she wants in the divorce settlement, he’s determined to thwart her. In both versions, the Roses resort to zany acts of sabotage and violence, in the struggle to win their war.
In Jay Roach’s film, written by Tony McNamara, the renamed couple’s first meeting takes place in London. Theo Rose is an architect. At lunch in a posh restaurant to celebrate their practice’s latest success, Theo can’t stand his colleagues’ self-congratulation a moment longer, and escapes to the restaurant kitchen, where he finds aspiring chef Ivy. They start chatting: it’s love/lust at first sight. Ivy’s about to depart for the US, in search of the culinary big time; Theo decides to go along, too. Fast forward ten years. The Roses and their precocious twin children live very comfortably in Mendocino. Theo’s building designs are all the rage. As well as a homemaker, Ivy (am I missing something clever or couldn’t the filmmakers think of a non-botanical forename for Mrs Rose?) is a food ‘artist’ of some kind, though her brilliance doesn’t seem much recognised outside the household.
The plot’s pivotal event is not a medical emergency but a professional debacle for Theo. His acclaimed design for a local naval museum is crowned by a spectacular construction in the shape of a sail, which collapses during a violent storm and brings down the building beneath. This happens shortly after Theo has set Ivy up in her own seafood restaurant, hilariously named ‘We’ve Got Crabs’. On the night of the storm, the place does great business thanks to people seeking shelter. The diners include a renowned food critic (Caroline Partridge), who gives ‘We’ve Got Crabs’ a rave review. Live video of the falling museum – accompanied by Theo’s voice desperately insisting ‘It’s not going to fall!’ – goes viral. His career disappears down the pan as his wife’s takes off into the stratosphere. In no time, Ivy is a celebrity chef and restaurateur. Theo is reduced to the role of house husband and keep-fit fanatic, subjecting himself and the twins, Hattie (Delaney Quinn) and Roy (Ollie Robinson), to a punishing exercise regime. Ivy and Theo’s former roles are further reversed when she, through franchising her vastly successful business, bankrolls him to design and build their dream house.
Three years later … the new house is complete, at eye-watering expense; the thirteen-year-old twins (now Hala Finley and Wells Rappaport) head off on sports scholarships to Miami – and it’s their departure that apparently triggers the complete breakdown of their parents’ marriage. The plotting of The Roses is less straightforward than in earlier versions of the story (according to Wikipedia synopses of those). Although Theo resents Ivy’s success, and she feels regretfully excluded from her children’s lives, the couple are still evidently fond of each other until Hattie and Roy depart the domestic scene. The Roses‘ prologue sees the title characters with a marriage guidance counsellor (Belinda Bromilow), who has asked them to write a list of ten positives about each other: both manage a couple of ludicrously basic, grudging pluses before their lists turn negative and build to a vicious, profane crescendo. This sequence, which ends with the Roses giggling together as they leave the shocked counsellor, is virtually reprised halfway through the film, just before the three-years-later jump forward, but I never understood when the counselling was happening in relation to the main narrative timeframe. These various complications mean the all-out marital battle that gave Warren Adler’s book its daft but catchy title, gets going properly only late in the day.
Jay Roach established himself in Hollywood through commercial success with the Austin Powers movies and, a few years later, the Meet the Parents/Fockers comedies. He has switched to serious stuff during the last decade with Trumbo (2015) and Bombshell (2019). Neither of those was up to much but they seem to have left their mark on Roach, judging from this indecisive return to filmmaking with laughs. The Roses’ dream-housewarming dinner party is a disaster: Ivy mocks and humiliates Theo relentlessly and, as she gets more drunk, their guests, too (more on that below). The next morning, when Theo goes out running, along the seashore, he comes upon a beached whale. With the help of other passers-by, he saves the creature, returning it to the ocean. Back home, he tells Ivy this was an uplifting, spiritual experience. Roach seems anxious to show that Theo means what he says. Yet this epiphany is not just the film’s most anomalous episode but also its phoniest.
In the event, Ivy’s reaction to the whale incident prompts Theo to tell her they’re finished and that he no longer loves her. Giving these lines to a husband brought low rather than to an exploited wife – and having him rather than her demand the house in a divorce settlement – is about as far as The Roses gets with updating the material from the 1980s gender politics that informed the Adler novel and the DeVito film. If Jay Roach was aiming to nuance the story, putting Tony McNamara on the script can’t have helped. McNamara, who co-wrote The Favourite (2018) then worked solo on the screenplay for Yorgos Lanthimos’ next number, Poor Things (2023), is a master of the smart-aleck one-liner. When it comes to emotionally honest dialogue, he has a tin ear: the writing exudes insincerity.
Actors can occasionally alchemise McNamara’s words, as Olivia Colman did in The Favourite. In The Roses, though, the supporting cast mostly basks in his snide wit, making clear they despise the egregious people they’re playing and looking very self-satisfied about making that clear. Andy Samberg is Barry, Theo’s friend and, in due course, his divorce lawyer; Kate McKinnon is Amy, Barry’s quasi-erotomaniac wife. I think the only time I was rooting for anyone in The Roses came at the housewarming, when Ivy gives this pair and others a hard time, and I was silently cheering her on. Allison Janney is quite entertaining as Ivy’s lawyer but she only has the one scene. The minority of British cast members includes, as well as the leads, Jamie Demetriou and Ncuti Gatwa. Watching this pair in the TV roles that have made them famous over here, I see performers doing a turn rather than portraying a character. The same thing happens in The Roses. Gatwa is OK as Ivy’s camp-as-Christmas front-of-house manager at the restaurant. Demetriou, as another Rose ‘friend’, is a dead spot on the screen.
The two British stars, to be fair, avoid the smugness of some of their American colleagues in the cast. As an eccentric character in a drama like Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021), Benedict Cumberbatch has shown he can be amusing, as well as touching. Here, though, as in Wes Anderson’s recent The Phoenician Scheme, his work looks like the product of research into comedy rather than of any feeling for it. He’s technically very skilled – you can hear and see that Cumberbatch has worked out precisely how and when to deliver each line and pull each facial expression – but the result isn’t funny: the actor doesn’t seem to bring anything of himself to the character. (He comes closest to raising a smile when Theo is simply running – the in corpore sano routine that doesn’t stop him going out of his mind.) Olivia Colman instinctively knows better. She often scores with the one-liners; she also gives Ivy some emotional layering. It goes to waste, though. Whether Jay Roach intends this or not, The Roses comes over as monotonously cynical. Benedict Cumberbatch’s hollow performance seems better aligned with this.
Ivy and Theo’s climactic dream-house battle ends with a few words of reconciliation and getting intimate. Ivy’s pride and joy in the kitchen is not its advanced technology but her ancient oven, which once belonged to Julia Child (Ivy bought it at auction). The kitchen carnage includes damage to the oven, which is leaking gas. As he and Ivy go into an amorous clinch, Theo instructs their smart home system (called HAL, ho-ho) to turn on a fire to warm things up even more. The screen goes white and the closing credits start. The gas explosion presumably means the end of the Roses, though it’s hard to care. It definitely means the end of The Roses, which is a relief.
11 September 2025