The Wife (2017) - Glenn Close’s spouse is pushed too far in tense drama

Credit: allocine.fr

It is early in the morning when Joe and Joan Castleman are awoken by a phone call. On the end of the line is a congratulatory, Swedish-accented voice: Joe has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he and his family are invited to Stockholm for the ceremony. What appears at first to be a complicit and supportive couple, jumping and down on their bed in unison at the thought of such an honour, is short-lived. Joan Castleman abruptly stops the festivities and disappears into the bathroom. Is it the shock, the overwhelming joy of the moment? Or is there something else going on?

Joan Castleman, played by the magnificent Glenn Close, is both radiant and self-effacing in Björn Runge’s drama based on Meg Wolitzer’s novel of the same name. Where her husband (Jonathan Pryce) is a talkative, popular man bordering on arrogant during social occasions, Joan is a canape-holder, a do-gooder, a figure in the shadows despite Joe’s constant proclamations of love and devotion to her in his otherwise self-absorbed speeches. Close portrays Joan with restraint and vulnerability: from the start, there is a sadness in her eyes that translates something more than the acceptance of a loved one’s overwhelmingly successful career. Pryce is equally talented, portraying Joe as both unlikeable and pitiful, no doubt accentuated by flashbacks to his past as a charming lecturer teaching a group of young female writer wannabes. Harry Lloyd and Annie Starke (Close’s real-life daughter) play the couple’s younger counterparts, retracing their first meeting through to the beginning of their affair, Joe casting off his first wife and baby for his younger lover. Here, the flashbacks mirror the present day: what appears to be the truth is in fact an illusion. Teacher and student intertwine and reverse, and the flirtatious, poetical writer is not who he claims to be. Neither is the Nobel Prize winner. When Joan decides to take the day off from her duties, Joe is at loss. When to take his medication, how to speak without his backbone beside him? During a particularly striking scene, he is mocked by his fellow winners for struggling to understand and repeat the motions of accepting his award during rehearsals. “It’s not rocket science,” laughs one of his fellow winners. But to Joe Castleman, it really is if his wife isn’t by his side.

The setting of Stockholm is icy: there are spies everywhere, whether it is son David (Max Irons), wounded by his father batting off his short story, or journalist Nathanial (Christian Slater), who suspects foul play. There is never a moment alone, never a moment to think: even when the couple are in bed, they are awoken by a group of singers who infiltrate their room in the early hours of the morning as part of the ceremony. Much like the female author (Elizabeth McGovern) who told her she would never be taken seriously as a writer in her youth, Joan doesn’t have her own space, her own voice. It has been stolen, and in the cold of the unknown Stockholm, Joan decides she wants it back. Unlike her husband, she is well aware of her surroundings and her words, with a snappy bite whenever she is misjudged or mistreated. “Joan,” she corrects flatly, when another Nobel Prize winner calls her ‘Jean’. It is a name she does not want people to forget. She is devoted, but she isn’t duped. Something is festering on the inside of an apparently perfect couple, and it is at the climax of her husband’s career that Joan Castleman finally comes into her own for all of us to see.