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“The Wife”

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Sep 02, 2018
Category: Drama

“The Wife” got enthusiastic reviews (The Times: “pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of spinning a fundamentally literary premise into an intelligent screen drama that unfolds with real juice and suspense”), and several friends liked it, and it was adapted from an admired novel by Meg Wolitzer, so off I went.

Maybe the reviewers and my friends saw a different version. The one I saw wasn’t a melodrama about a Nobel Prize-winning novelist (Jonathan Pryce) and his enabling wife (Glenn Close), but a paint-by-numbers soap opera that kissed every cliché on the lips: the pompous writer whose lectures are sophomoric when he’s teaching at Smith and is not one bit wiser when he’s published a shelf of Great Books, the writer’s son who gets no respect from dad, the smarmy biographer in a leather jacket, the publishing editors who would be out of business in ten minutes if they were as stupid as they’re represented here, a Nobel speech that sounds like the first few minutes of a tech award at the Oscars.

Chekhov famously said, “If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” The screenwriter clearly has that framed and hanging on her wall, for every event is doubled: the walnut the writer carries, jumping on the bed, the dreary quote from “The Dead.” And I could go on….

As the mouse who — finally — roars, Close gives a Streep-worthy, Oscar-bound performance. But all I could think of was Philip Roth; if Pryce’s ridiculous writer is anybody’s idea of a Nobel winner, Roth deserved two.