THE WIFE – Review

Glenn Close as Joan Castleman, listening as her novelist husband gives his acceptance speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony, in THE WIFE. Photo by Graeme Hunter, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics ©

Glenn Close gives one of the best performances of her career in THE WIFE, a drama exploring the relationship of a long-married couple as the husband, a famous author, is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The drama peels back the layers of the relationship and the inner life of the wife, while exploring society’s shifting attitudes towards women’s careers, with both gripping performances and an engrossing and timely story.

There is that old saying “behind every great man is a great woman,” a phrase that seems to praise that woman while also leaving her in his shadow. The relationship between brash famous author husband Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) and his quiet, elegant wife Joan (Glen Close) seems the epitome of that saying. The couple is also a study in contrasts: Joe is outgoing, egotistical and loves the spotlight, while Joan is shy, self-effacing and reserved. Yet it is clear from the first scenes that Joe is barely functional without his wife, who organizes his life as well as smoothing over the many ruffled feathers Joe leaves in his wake. Like many long-married couples, there is a kind of short-hand between them, and there is also a mix of affection and annoyance on the part of the wife.

Joe winning the Nobel Prize in 1992, a time of expanding opportunities for women, brings other tensions to the surface, feelings and facts that Joan has been struggling to ignore. It is more than emotional support and organization that Joan brings to her marriage to Joe. Once a promising author herself, she chose to bury her own ambitions when she married Joe, and instead put her energy into promoting his career. It is a decision many women of her generation made, one with a high cost for the truly talented.

Swedish director Bjorn Runge and scriptwriter Jane Anderson turn Meg Wolitzer’s gripping 2003 novel into a compelling drama that not only captures to nature of this kind of traditional martial arrangement but also on the disparate treatment female and male authors receive from publishers and from readers in the earlier eras. But lest you think this is something from the distant past, when women authors like George Sand had to write under a man’s name, remember that the author of the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowlings, used a gender-neutral pen name to avoid that very prejudice. In the case of Joan Castleman, once a promising writer in college in the 1950s, giving up the battle for recognition to join forces with a male author, a published college professor who already seemed on his way to literary success, might have seemed like a good compromise. Certainly it is a compromise talented women had been making for generations, subsuming their own ambitions to serve the career of a husband.

Still, the film’s strong suit is Glenn Close’s performance. Close has been nominated for Oscars six times without winning and her performance here has the goods to finally nab her the win. Close plays a woman who is often opaque to those around her, the one who diplomatically steps in to smooth over gaffs by her famous husband and then fades back into her background role as supportive wife. But Close always gives one the feeling it is a role Joan is playing, and that both intelligence and secrets lie beneath her polished surface. In Stockholm, under the pressures of the Nobel Prize hoopla, Joan’s facade and reserve start to crack, finally exploding in emotional fury. Close conveys all Joan’s complex feelings, and her turmoil underneath as well as the polished surface, with brilliance.

Close goes through a range of emotions – frustration, affection, opaque reserve, patience, rage – as Joan, a woman who has made a kind of pact with her husband which seemed like the best choice at the time. The flashback sequences both describe how that happened and illustrate the daunting obstacles that ambitious women writers faced in the repressive, sexist atmosphere of the 1950s and early’60s. To Joan, it looked much easier to marry a rising writer than to become one.

Close is teamed with Jonathan Pryce as her husband, a pairing that could not be better. Close and Pryce are excellent together, but the film is really Close’s. Pryce provides the perfect foil for Close’s fine, nuanced performance, right there in their shared scenes but never trying to steal her fire. The delicacy of that casting is part of why now is the right moment for this film, and why it took ten years to make it. Ten years ago it was hard to find an actor of big enough standing to star in a supporting role in a film titled THE WIFE.

From time to time, the film flashes back to the couple’s early days, giving us insights on how they arrived at this point. Those segments begin when the couple met, when she was a promising student in his creative writing class at an East Coast university. Annie Starke plays the young Joan, while Harry Lloyd plays the young Joe. Young Joan is both talented and beautiful, capturing the professor’s attention despite the fact that he is married. The pair’s romance also reflects a literary trend of the time, mirroring post-WWII social changes, with a brash young man from a working-class Jewish family becoming romantically involved with a blonde young woman from an upper-class WASP family.

Starke, who is also Glen Close’s daughter, does well outlining young Joan’s meek but ambitious character, and the resemblance between them helps as well. Harry Lloyd, who will be familiar to some from his role as Viserys Targaryen on “Game of Thrones,” plays the younger Joe as a dominant personality, even a bully, divorcing his wife to marry talented, pliant Joan, and laying the foundation for the older couple’s relationship. Elizabeth McGovern delivers a memorable performance, as a frustrated woman author whose career is doomed by the sexist literary attitudes of the late ’50s and early ’60s, in a pivotal scene for Joan.

Also helping fill in the picture of the Castleman’s marriage is Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), an oily would-be biographer who has trailed them to Stockholm, probing for background for his book, and their grown son David (Max Irons), an aspiring author brooding over the father’s lack of approval. David’s presence draws out details of family dynamics, while Nathaniel’s efforts to cozy up to Joan provide some entertaining and revealing scenes for Close’s character.

THE WIFE is a striking drama delving into the heated emotional territory of one long-married couple’s relationship but set against the sweeping social changes towards the creative work of women since the last half of the previous century. Even more, THE WIFE is a tour-de-force showcase for the considerable talents of one woman, Glenn Close, a performance that could win her that long-deserved Oscar.

THE WIFE, in English and Swedish with English subtitles, opens Friday, Sept. 7, at Plaza Frontenac Cinema.

RATING: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars