There is a brittleness that permeates the entire length of the Björn Runge directed, Jane Anderson-scripted film The Wife (based on the book of the same name by Meg Wolitzer) which has nothing to do with the snowy wintry setting of Stockholm where much of the story takes place.
The fragility at play is one borne entirely of emotional decisions long-ago made, and forever after regretted, a self-made Faustian pact that has locked husband and famed novelist Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce as older Joe, Harry Lloyd as the younger) and supposed behind-the-scenes wife Joan (Glenn Close in a mesmerisingly-gripping, award-worthy performance; younger version by her daughter Annie Starke) into an alliance of duplicity that has corroded their marriage to the point that only the loving, picture-perfect facade, and some whispers of once vital love, remain.
Their tense-but-enduring bond may have lived on until the end of their natural lives had Joe not been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, triggering a cascading series of events that ultimately unravel the fraud in which they were both once willing participants and precipitate a reckoning that is long overdue.
To discuss this pact of beautifully-manicured but ultimately poisonous lies would be to reveal too much of a plot that unfolds with an exquisitely well-wrought glacial slowness that is never less than utterly engrossing; suffice to say that the revelations that passively-aggressively tumble out in long-held slow motion are enthralling, if only for what they disclose about the darker shadows of human nature and the lies we tell ourselves and others.
The unfurling is aided in part by the presence of writer Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), an ambitious though opportunistic would-be biographer who finagles his way on the Castlemans’ Concorde flight to Europe in pursuit of the holy grail of biographies – the life story of the great Joe Castleman himself.
In response to Nathaniel’s cheerfully menacing approaches – his style is all sweetness, light and writerly camaraderie but his piranha-like intent is manifestly clear – Joe is brusquely-dismissive, Joan is icily-pleasant and their disaffected son David (Max Irons), who is an aspiring writer clamouring for his father’s imprimatur, is fair game, so laden with hurt and anger that he cannot see Nathaniel for who he actually is.
Nathaniel, however, is not the problem; rather he is the messenger, the one blowing a revelatory trumpet that Joe does not want to hear and which Joan, who is every bit as complicit in the literary charade as her husband, has grown tired of hearing to the point where her well-deflective facade begins to slip and fall, just when it is needed, in some senses, the most.
Long unhappy with the deal she long ago made with her husband, which has shunted her to a supportive she never wanted but felt she had no choice but to accept, she had made an art of acting as the happy spouse, the one an arm’s length from the messy business of writing, who is nonetheless, integral to her husband’s success.
The issue is, of course, just how crucial is she?
No one is saying, save for Nathaniel, but as Joe is schooled in Nobel Prize receiving etiquette, where he is both elated and conflicted and tempted to once more stray romantically, this time with Linnea (Karin Franz Körlof), the photographer assigned to capture his steps to Nobel glory, and Joan is forced to play the part of the supportive wife and nothing else, the smile long gone from her eyes and present only on her mouth, it all begins to unravel, thread by agonisingly painful, emotionally-repressed thread.
For a process so wretchedly painful, and yet for Joan simultaneously, oddly-cathartic, it is beguilingly beautiful to watch, with every scene, augmented by Close’s masterful ability to say a great deal with very little – the role is largely an internalised one with Close’s eyes doing much of the breathtakingly-impressive heavy lifting – and the gorgeously restrained cinematography of Ulf Brantås which uses shadows, the icy stillness of night and the vastness of the hotel rooms and presentation halls to speak volumes about the great divide that exists between Joe and Joan behind the picture-perfect “love of my life” facade.
In the early stages of the film where the outer veneer reins supreme, there are telltale lines of dialogue and facial expressions, courtesy of Close, that suggest everything is not as rosy as her pasted-on smiles and well-practised spiel suggests.
These hints of a storm beneath the idyllic overlay are given far more substance and import when flashbacks to the early days of Joe and Joan’s relationship, which begin in infidelity with the former as an Ivy League married college professor and the latter an ambitious writing student, and continued in much the same deceptive vein thereafter.
Much of the duplicity stems from Joan’s internalised belief, based partly on the bitter late-1950s warnings of writer Elaine Mozell (Elizabeth McGovern) and on her observance of the misogyny of the day (which the #MeToo movement has highlighted is still all too rampant), that she will never make it as a writer on her own.
The brilliance of The Wife is that it never nails any obvious clumsy judgements to the wall; rather it lets Joe and Joan hosit themselves on their own failing petard, again and again, both complict, both fallible and both driven by personal demons that somehow common ground and sense of self in their marriage.
This is a morality tale that never attempts to be that patently transparent or clumsy; it is content to tell it story and tell it slowly, richly and with great unravelling import, and let the long-disguised chips fall where they may.
Though it recalls those immortal lines from Sir Walter Scott’s 1808 poem, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field “Oh, what a tangled web we weave
/ When first we practise to deceive!”, the intent of The Wife, one of the most hypnotically-magnetic films to arrive in theatres in some time, simply seems to be to shine a light on the crumbly fallibility of humanity, and in so doing, underline how even the most inspired of initial plans can quickly curdle and sour into a monster than quickly subsumes and subverts any of its promised or imagined rewards to the near-eternal detriment of everyone involved.