The Wife

I have been eagerly anticipating the release of The Wife since I saw the trailer a few weeks ago and I had the opportunity to see it yesterday afternoon.  I found it to be very compelling.  Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  He and his wife Joan (Glenn Close) travel to Stockholm for the award ceremony where he is showered with adulation while she holds his coat, hands him his reading glasses, reminds him to take his pills, and overlooks his flirting with a beautiful photographer.  As the events surrounding the presentation ceremony transpire over a few days, Joan begins to reflect on her role of supporting wife with flashbacks to her days as an aspiring writer at Smith College and conversations with Castelman's would-be biographer (Christian Slater).  Glenn Close gives an absolutely brilliant performance, one of the best of her career.  Joan is quietly self-contained until thirty years of being taken for granted become unbearable during Castleman's acceptance speech.  This scene is amazing because it is like watching a gathering storm and, when she lets loose, it is a category 5 hurricane.  She shares some positively explosive scenes with Pryce and it is heartbreaking when she realizes how much she loves him.  I did feel that the flashback scenes to the characters' younger selves (Annie Starke and Harry Lloyd) are poorly executed and completely unnecessary as they take away the momentum of the story being told in Stockholm.  Also, the narrative is a very slow exploration of the disintegration of a tumultuous marriage without a lot of action so it might not be for everyone.  However, Close elevates this fairly ordinary movie into something extraordinary and I highly recommend it for her performance.

Note:  In many ways this film reminds me of 45 Years.