The Wife is an adaptation of the Meg Wolitzer novel (2003) and stars Glenn Close. Her performance is better than the film, but it’s such a magnificent performance that it more than carries the day. She is stunning. Close plays Joan Castleman, wife of Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), a literary giant who has always been lionised, and for reasons we’ll discover she is simmering with rage. We’ve seen Close do rage before, but this time the rage is multilayered, nuanced, subtly restrained. No bunnies are boiled, in other words, although having said that, if I were Joan, I’d have boiled Joe’s bunny and whatever else was to hand, like his head. But that could just be me.
Adapted by Jane Anderson and directed by Bjorn Runge, the film is set in 1993, and opens with the news that Joe has just been awarded the Nobel Prize. Joe, who appears to be a Norman Mailer type, or a Saul Bellow type, or a Philip Roth type — so many of these chaps! — is thrilled and so is Joan, it seems. ‘We’ve won the Nobel Prize, we’ve won the Nobel Prize,’ they cry gleefully as they bounce on the bed. They travel to Sweden, where Joe holds court and is fêted while Joan is patronised and offered ‘shopping trips and beauty treatments’. She thinks of everything: what time he should take his pills, where his reading glasses are, what’s next on his schedule. She is the perfect, supportive wife — wasn’t she as gleeful as him when they jumped on that bed? — but also, you now realise, there is something ambivalent about her. You can tell simply by her flashing eyes. Or that look she gives when Joe says that she could never have been a writer herself.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in