I found this a compelling, complex and emotionally sad story which puts a whole new meaning to the quote "Behind every great man there's a great woman."
In this case the woman is great and the man's greatness is totally based on his wife's anonymous contribution to his fame and success .
All through the years of their long marriage Joan Castlemaine has been a willing accomplice and contributor to her husbands literary fame . At the announcement that he has won the Nobel prize she starts to question her role in his success and the price she has had to pay for the wealth and fame .She is told by another woman author that it would be unlikely that she could ever achieve success on her own in a literary world dominated by male publishers and critics, thankfully not the case in today's world.
Glenn Close as Joan Castleman and Jonathan Price as her Nobel prize winning author husband Joe give superb performances and Christian Slater as Nathaniel Bone the persistent and probing biographer , who wants to expose the fraud are all excellent.
Glenn Close is among a handful of great actresses of the caliber of Meryl Streep , Judy Dench and Helen Mirren , who can express more in their eyes and facial expressions without saying a word than other actors can express with 100 lines of dialogue.
We were fortunate enough to see her live last year on Broadway as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard and she was mesmerising in that also.
There's a scene in The Wife , when Joe is receiving his Nobel prize and being effusively patronising about his wife's contribution to his award and the expression of loathing regret and embarrassment on Glenn Close's face is heartbreaking , when she realises what price her compliance and enabling has cost her and her children over the years.
It's a film well worth seeing reminded me of Ingmar Bergman 's style of austere raw human frailty and emotion , both parties are accomplices in their own misery and it's too late to start over again.
Without spoiling the final scenes , which I was not expecting I felt optimistic that when Joan stares at a blank page that she may at long last resume her solo writing vocation.
Review of The Wife
