In a career spanning four decades, Glenn Close has played a number of wildly varied roles, earning six Oscar nominations (three for Best Supporting Actress, followed by three for lead) without yet snagging a win. If larger-than-life characters such as Cruella de Vil made Hollywood forget she achieved early acclaim playing real people in the likes of The Big Chill and The Natural, The Wife will serve as a welcome reminder.
The film, adapted from Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel, opens in the 1990s with an epic eye-roll from Close’s Joan as her husband Joe (Pryce) pesters her for sex, while they await the call from the Nobel committee that will seal his status as one of the greats. News of the award reinvigorates the ambitions of Joe’s smooth-talking biographer (Slater on seductive form), who has been raking over the coals of their lives, and seems determined to expose not only Joe’s many infidelities, but also other, far more damaging, secrets.
Glenn Close gives a performance that demands the Oscar voters consider her for a seventh time.
This is teased out through flashbacks to the early 1960s, when young Joe (Harry Lloyd) and Joan (Annie Starke) meet for the first time. Back then, he was an unhappily married literature professor with a child and an unborn first novel, while Joan was his student and an aspiring writer. An affair was almost inevitable — and arguably vital in order for Joe to blossom into the writer he became, while Joan’s own literary aspirations were ultimately eclipsed by Joe’s success.
Such archetypes could easily be the stuff of cliché or melodrama, but Wolitzer is much too clever to gravitate towards obvious tropes, etching characters of subtlety and nuance, and taking them in unexpected directions. Likewise, Emmy-winning screenwriter Jane Anderson (HBO’s Olive Kitteridge) expertly navigates its narratively tricksy structure, while Swedish director Björn Runge does a good job of evoking the twin period settings (a shot of Concorde in flight proves surprisingly emotional) as well as the pomp and self-importance of the Nobel ceremony. And when Close and Pryce are going at it like Burton and Taylor in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, he mostly has the good sense to sit back and give the actors room to shine.
The film does have one problem the book doesn’t, however: so magnetic are the two leads, there’s a massive energy drain every time the narrative flashes back to the 1960s. It’s not necessarily the fault of the actors playing young Joe and Joan; nonetheless, you can’t wait to be back with their older selves. But such lulls are a small price to pay for the sheer magnitude of the performances that power the film.
