The Wife is Glenn Close at her best

IF YOU love blockbusters and big comedies, you’re well catered for. But for everyone else who wants a smart, thoughtful film, finally, here’s one for you.

ROUGHLY 10 minutes into the smart, powerfully performed and captivating film The Wife, someone mentions Bill Clinton’s name.

Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) has just been told he’s going to be awarded the Nobel prize in literature and at a celebration party hosted by his wife Joan (Glenn Close), Joe’s agent gleefully tells him that a magazine is going to knock Clinton off the cover for him.

The year is 1992 and Clinton is about to win the presidency. It’s a throwaway line and the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world is never mentioned again.

Maybe the reference was a matter of era-setting or maybe it was an intentional wink at the audience (though if it was, Pryce didn’t know about it), but the parallels between the Clintons and the Castlemans are unmistakeable.

The Clintons have been a formidable presence in American life for decades and, at least at first, the image they projected was of the powerful public man and the supportive wife standing behind him, and stoically by him through waves of scandal.

We don’t know what happens behind closed doors at the Clinton house but we know that for the first few chapters of their political lives, Bill came first, Hillary second.

In the Castleman household, it’s the same — Joe first, Joan second.

You never know what’s happening behind closed doors.

Joe is a successful author who’s had a long and vaunted career, his books beloved by those who know about these things. When he wins the Nobel, it’s the culmination of a lifetime’s work.

Receiving the call with the news, he asks if Joan can jump on the other phone. Joan’s face, as she clutches that handset, is of nervous anticipation, then pride followed by an enigmatic combination that could be resentment, disappointment and a trace of fear all rolled into one.

For every one of Joe’s achievements is also Joan’s. She takes care of him — takes his coat when they walk into a room, stands by his side in a crowd and she looks away when he flirts with younger women. When he blusters, she passively fades into the background.

It’s a universal dynamic and it’s a visual composition that women all over the world know all too well, of the sacrifices that are made.

Through flashbacks we find out how Joe (Harry Lloyd as the young version) and Joan (Annie Stark, Glenn Close’s daughter) meet — she as his promising and talented writing student and he as her teacher at Smith College — and how that uneven partnership developed.

Just how much the woman behind the throne is responsible for the man on the throne is revealed over the course of the film.

READ MORE: Jonathan Pryce on The Wife, Game of Thrones and Bond

Ultimate side-eye.

Always underestimated, except by a would-be biographer played by Christian Slater, Joan’s mighty intellect is on show for us. We know she understands human nature better than her husband, that she sees people, even when they don’t see her.

What Close does with this character is nothing short of extraordinary. It’s a restrained performance, all leading to an inevitable emotional eruption — it’s in her eyes, it’s in her bearing and it’s in the sadness and quiet rage that she deftly conceals on the surface until it all becomes too much.

Pryce, imbuing Joe with a nervous energy, is the perfect companion to Close, playing a kind-of-villain who doesn’t seem to have the full self-awareness of his flaws, or of his wife’s interiority.

Directed by Swede Bjorn Runge, The Wife is a searing look at a messy and long marriage careering towards a breakdown. It’s a movie for grown-ups, a thoughtful antidote to the box office bombasts, and it has one of the most phenomenal performances so far this year.

Rating: ★★★★

The Wife is in cinemas now.

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