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Glenn Close is the supportive but perhaps secretly resentful Wife of novelist Jonathan Pryce |
Director: Björn Runge
Cast: Glenn Close (Joan Castleman), Jonathan Pryce (Joseph
Castleman), Christian Slater (Nathaniel Bone), Max Irons (David Castleman),
Annie Starke (Young Joan Castleman), Harry Lloyd (Young Joseph Castleman), Elizabeth
McGovern (Elaine Mozell)
The old cliché used to be: behind every successful man,
there’s a woman. The Wife explores
just such a woman – and uses this story for a brilliantly structured, tightly
written exploration of the tensions and sacrifices that underpin a partnership (and
relationship) where the man is the sole public figure. In 1992, Joe Castleman
(Jonathan Pryce) is a hugely successful novelist, being honoured with the Nobel
Prize for Literature. Standing beside him at all times is his wife Joan (Glenn
Close), silent, supportive, taking care of all her husband’s needs. But as her
husband is surrounded by praise and flattery, has her patience finally begun to
snap?
Much of the attention for The Wife has focused on Glenn Close’s performance as Joan. And
while her performance is superb, there is much more to this film than that.
This is a well written, brilliantly acted, carefully shot relationship drama
that manages to explore interesting details about how sexism, gender expectations
and the patriarchy turn some brilliant, intelligent and gifted women into
ciphers who must hide their skills under a bushel. The Wife is an engrossing, small scale drama that leaves you with a
lot to think about.
Runge’s camera is slow and subtle, carefully zooming into
parts of the scene that don’t seem at first to be central, but are revealed to
be so. Many of these moments centre around Joan, a woman quietly at the edge of
scenes, ignored by people, responding only when required. She calmly follows
her husband’s lead, while quietly tending his needs (reminding him of
appointments, making sure he takes his medicine, apologising for his
abruptness).
This sort of framing requires a lot of quiet, “reaction”
acting from Close – and she excels at this. Close’s performance is a
masterclass in subtlety, her face a mask of micro-reactions that leave the
viewer guessing at all times exactly what she is feeling about all of the
events she witnesses. No scene covers this better than when she listens in on
the line as her husband is informed of his Nobel prize – her face slowly,
carefully, unreadably changes from delight and pride to something far more
equivocal, her face frozen in a look of – well is it anger, horror, frustration?
It’s impossible to tell. After that, the entire film is a study in interpreting
the exact feelings this woman has for the behaviour of, and praise for, her
husband. What does she feel about this? What does she really think? How far
does loyalty to her husband stretch?
Muck-raking, sensationalist would-be Castleman biographer
Nathaniel Bone (a wonderfully sleazy Christian Slater) has a good idea that
there is a lot of anger there – and gambles in a series of offers and
interjections that Joan’s loyalty only stretches so far. How far is she
responsible for the literary success of her husband? Flashbacks carefully woven
into the film show in the early sixties the young Joan (played very well by
Close’s real life daughter Annie Starke) as a promising literary writer who
falls under the influence of her charismatic professor, young Joe (Harry Lloyd
a slightly awkward fit as the arrogant bohemian writer). In the boorish, Mad
Men-ish 60s, Joan feels her chance of being recognised as a writer in her own
right is close to zero – indeed she’s told to forget it altogether by a bitter
former alumna of her Ivy League college, played archly by Elizabeth McGovern – so
decides hitching her star to Joe, a promising potential author, seems the best
option.
But how much of that promise can Joe actively achieve? And
how much of a literary as well as a personal partnership is this marriage? And
has Joe lost all track of this? It’s easy to overlook how essential Jonathan
Pryce is to the success of this film, but his Joe is a wonderful creation, a
bombastic, larger-than-life, selfish even slightly childish figure, everyone’s
idea of the great artist, living the cliché of constant praise and a series of
seductions. Pryce’s Joe is a domineeringly unattractive figure who slowly
reveals his own emotional fragility wrapped in dependency – and the scenes with
him and Close (that take up much of the movie) first hum with unspoken tensions
and then later throb with the cathartic release of these feelings.
Those scenes when they come – and you can tell they’re coming
from the start – are fantastic. Close is on the top of her game here, utterly
believable as a woman who over the course of a few days slowly begins to
question every decision she has ever made in her life. What Close does so
brilliantly though is to show the balance, the lack of certainty, the mixed
feelings she has – that people who in some way infuriate her, also provoke
great love in her. Pryce is just as fabulous as her equally aggrieved husband.
There are moments in these late scenes that tip into melodrama and cliché – but
the general thrust of the scenes is so strong, you feel it gets away with it.
Runge has directed a marvellous low-key piece of work that
feels like it would make an excellent play. It raises questions on the place of
women in the 20th century – and the film’s setting is crucial, as a Joan
growing up 10 years later might well have had a very different life – and the
film has a brilliant eye for the everyday sexism and patronising assumptions
made by people about the wives of ‘great men’. Powered with two brilliant
central performances, this film deserves to be seen as something much more than
just Close’s vehicle to possible (but sadly not to be) Oscar glory.
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