Right Star, Wrong Prize

The Wife a film by Bjorn Runge.  With Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Max Irons, Christian Slater.  ***1/2

The reason to see this movie is for the performances, especially the one by Glenn Close, but also Max Irons and Christian Slater.  Jonathan Pryce plays a nebbish named Joe Castleman and does a creditable job, but the man is so annoying it’s hard to warm up to him.  Then we’re expected to believe that this doofus won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

That, I would say, is the primary flaw of the movie.  If it had been a National Book Award, or a Pulitzer Prize, we might accept that he stumbled into it.  But the Nobel?  They sometimes pick a total obscurity but never miss by this much.  This guy can hardly walk onto the stage without help.

But as Joan Castleman, the aggrieved wife of a fatuous guy who gets too much credit for everything, who is really in some sense a fraud, who apparently seduces every young woman he can get his hands on, Glenn Close gives one of the great performances of her career.  How, for instance, do you react when such a man wins a huge literary award, happy of course, genuinely happy, but also seeing right through him.  Then you have to accompany him everywhere, constantly be introduced as his wife, and constantly explain who you are, and what you do, and the guy is one of these babyish men who can’t seem to be without his wife for one minute, and he eats too much, and eats all the wrong things, and tells the same stupid jokes and recites the same lines he’s been reciting all his life.  Even his ploy to seduce a new young woman, which somehow involves inscribing a walnut (?), has never changed.

Max Irons is every bit as good, though not as central to the story, as David Castleman, the son of the great man (he actually is Jeremy Irons’ son, so he know whereof he speaks).  There is a hurt, almost sad look to his eyes during the whole performance; he’s trying to be a writer and desperately wants his father’s approval, but there is no amount of approval that will satisfy him; his mother, at one point, praises a story he has written, and her words obviously mean nothing.  He needs to hear it from his father.  And his father—like fathers everywhere—resolutely refuses to give what the son needs.  We have no idea if the story is good or not.  But the son is in a dreadful situation, trying to do what his father has supposedly done superbly well.

Christian Slater is Castleman’s would-be biographer, Nathaniel Bone.  Castleman has for some reason refused to give him permission to write an authorized biography, apparently because he doesn’t like the man, and Bone has instead gotten a contract to write “a book” on Castleman, apparently a lurid, tell-all book.  The long scene where he interviews Joan is fascinating as it shows his scheming and her ability to see right through it.  We don’t see his conversation with David, but see his approach, masterful as always.  David isn’t as savvy as his mother.

The movie is replete with flashbacks of how Joe and Joan met and how they were when they were young; fascinatingly, the young Joan is played by Close’s real life daughter, Annie Stark.  Joan herself was an aspiring writer, first a student in Castleman’s class at Smith, then his babysitter, then one of a number of young women whom he seduced (one always wonders why the woman doesn’t see that, if he’s seducing her, he’s likely to go after the next young thing that comes along).  I understand how a student can so admire a professor that she falls in love with him, but the young Castleman (Harry Lloyd; I’m waiting to hear that he’s a descendant of Harold Lloyd[1]) already seems rather fatuous, and doesn’t exude charm; the idea that such a lovely woman would fall for him, and stay through all he does, is as hard to believe as that he wins the Nobel.

There is a secret at the heart of this movie that it would be unfair to give away, or even hint at (though you could probably guess it if you thought for a moment).  It is the major surprise that is revealed toward the end, the thing that Bone is pushing at with all his questions.  Frankly, I find the whole situation preposterous.  This movie—and apparently the Meg Wolitzer novel, though I haven’t read it—rests on a foundation of sand.

There is nevertheless something about Close’s performance which very much does work, and resonates with the times (Wolitzer seems to have a genius for picking the perfect subject).  Close isn’t just playing the wife of a famous writer; she’s playing every woman who has ever been overlooked, talked over, not given credit, or dismissed: she’s playing every woman, basically.  Interestingly, it is when her husband tries to give her credit (she had warned him not to) that she flies into a rage.  Anything he could say would fall far short.  Seeing the way Joan calculates her every mood through the movie, the way she puts up with so much petty childish behavior, the way people worship her husband in a way he doesn’t fundamentally deserve, and then seeing her finally blow her stack as she should have years before is supremely satisfying.[2]  It’s a huge moment of catharsis at the end of a brilliant performance.  But Old Joe—in the movie’s most melodramatic moment—finds a way to ruin even that.

[1] It’s better than that, actually.  He’s the great-great-great grandson of Charles Dickens.  And he wants to be a writer.

[2] There is one scene that is unintentionally comic.  Don’t read on if you don’t like spoilers.  We’ve all done insane things during a marital spat, but throwing your Nobel Prize medal out the window of a moving car has to rank pretty high on the all-time list.  In a subsequent scene, as the chauffeur stops and runs back to retrieve it, I thought, judging from the pressure these couples are under (every family member of a Nobel winner looks absolutely dreadful), this probably happens every year.  The chauffeurs probably get instructions on how to go retrieve a medal.