«The Wife»: courtly love

Cinema Wednesdays - Thierry Fivaz

Joseph Castleman and his wife Joan are ecstatic when he is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But underneath the couple's conventional appearances, there are things left unsaid, lies and secrets. And resentment too. A whole range of things - their history, after all - that will color and weigh down what was supposed to be a triumph. 

It’s likely that at the end of the 2019 Oscars ceremony, Glenn Close must have had a touching thought for Joan Castleman, the character she brilliantly portrays in The Wife. Since, like Joan, the actress remained in the shadows, impassively dignified, having to settle for a simple thank-you from the winner (Olivia Colman, in this case). We would have loved, however, for reality to come to the rescue of fiction and (finally) reward Glenn Close (seven Oscar nominations for seven disappointments). But that was not to be. Fortunately for her, the actress can take comfort in her Golden Globe Award received a few days earlier. In that respect, the actress is better off than her character.

A character who—let's talk about it—comes to us from Meg Wolitzer's novel of the same name (or The Lining (for the French translation) a story adapted and brought to the screen by Swedish director Björn Runge. The plot, which is, all in all, fairly conventional, unfolds in a linear fashion and, starting in the second third of the film, is accompanied by flashback looking back on important moments in the couple's life: how they met (she was a student and he was a university professor), their budding romance (he gave up everything to build a life with her), and their secrets.

The film opens with an intimate scene, where we see that despite the weight of the years, Joseph (played by an excellent Jonathan Pryce) and Joan still manage to love one another. A few hours later, the couple learns that Joseph has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is a crowning achievement for the writer—a moment that should be joyful, yet one that takes on a bittersweet tone.

As the Castelman family travels to Stockholm, resentments and other bitter feelings come to the surface. Joan is fed up with being reduced to «the wife of» and having to play the role of the model, bland wife. Adding to her misery are the constant indiscretions of her husband, who is always ready to seduce young women impressed by the fact that they’re in the presence of a writer—and a Nobel laureate, no less.

This prestigious and imposing aura makes life all the more difficult for David (Max Irons), the couple’s son. Having chosen the harder path, David wants to become a writer like his father. Struggling with the constant comparisons and desperate for even the slightest bit of his father’s approval, the young man both hates and admires this father whom he knows is imperfect, yet who remains (for now) his hero, his role model—his father, after all.

But is all this fuss justified? What if the story behind this literary success isn’t as simple as it seems? What if, in the end, the much-admired writer isn’t the author of his own work but merely a character—a fabricated facade? That, at any rate, is the theory put forward by a journalist (Christian Slater) who is determined to uncover the truth.

Yet, amid all this excitement, all this pent-up anger, and the obligatory social niceties, parents and children love one another. Some scenes, in fact, are touchingly authentic, such as the one where, interrupted in the middle of an argument, the couple learns that their grandson has been born. A joyful event that ultimately reminds us that life lies elsewhere. In the end, the film seems to tell us, the truth doesn’t matter—all that matters are the people we love. Childlike, tender, and gentle, this quirky couple perhaps shows us what love looks like when we’re no longer in our twenties.

Photo credit: © Impuls Pictures

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