REVIEW: The Wife could be the movie to partner Glenn Close with an Oscar and crown a great career

REVIEW: The Wife is a superb acting showcase for the evergreen talents of Glenn Close, who plays the long-suffering and smothered spouse of an award-winning novelist.

scene from The Wife (2018), an Icon Films release.

THE WIFE (M)

Rating: Three and a half stars (3.5 out of 5)

Director: Bjorn Runge (Happy End)

Starring: Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Max Irons, Annie Starke, Harry Lloyd.

His eyes value the prize, her mind counts the cost

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The Wife runs a definitive, damning red line through that age-old saying “behind every great man is a woman.”

Adapted from the 2003 bestseller by Meg Wolitzer, The Wife sees this imbalanced dynamic from a completely different perspective: behind every great dream chased by a man, you will find a dream abandoned by a woman.

scene from The Wife (2018), an Icon Films release.

By the closing minutes of this steadily involving drama, a shrewdly measured performance from Glenn Close is communicating this notion so delicately, and yet, so powerfully.

Close plays Joan, the devoted long-term spouse of Joe (Jonathan Pryce), a renowned novelist about to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The news comes through via an early morning phone call. Joan is told to listen in on another line, as if some kind of secretary or personal assistant.

Though the couple are almost delirious with joy over the prospect of attending the Nobel awards ceremony in Stockholm, there is something about Joan’s manner that suggests all is not as it seems with this marriage.

Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce in The Wife

Could her husband’s crowning achievement also trigger a compulsory moment of truth Joan has always backed away from?

An aggressively inquisitive fellow named Nathaniel (an excellent Christian Slater) reckons he might know the answer to that one, even if Joan does not.

A writer of sorts, Nathaniel wants the rights to do an authorised biography of Joe, and he has followed the novelist and his wife to Stockholm to gain some kind of leverage over them.

There are a few flaws to be found in The Wife, most of them stemming from a series of flashbacks (using different actors) to flesh out the early days of Joan and Joe’s relationship.

It is here we learn that Joan is actually Joe’s second wife, and in choosing that role, smothered her true calling so he could fulfill his true potential.

Glenn Close in The Wife

While these scenes do explain a lot about the unspoken divide that has grown between Joan and Joe over time, these cutaways also can reduce the momentum that Close s working hard to build.

Particularly is some spine-tingling moments where Close’s performance pivots ever so slightly to offer glimpses of the woman Joan might have been. Or is that might still be?

Originally published as REVIEW: The Wife could be the movie to partner Glenn Close with an Oscar and crown a great career