What would it feel like to win a Nobel prize? That phone call in an early morning hour. Things that take place between then and your arrival to Stockholm. And after you arrive. What do you have to do? What will other recipients be like? How will you get along? The best thing about The Wife is that it lets you have a glimpse into that. Unfortunately, there's more to the film and I found the actual story somewhat problematic. It started showing cracks even before the big reveal. From small contrivances like Joe (Johnathan Price) appearing to be the only one given a photographer to follow him around to the younger version of him (Harry Lloyd) looking way too young to be a professor at an Ivy league school. As we learn more about him, that becomes even more questionable. The big reveal causes the movie to lose balance. As it probably should. Except, it doesn't necessarily happen for the right reasons. Maybe if they didn't go from point A to B and then straight to Z, it wouldn't have seemed so implausible. They give us a peek into somewhere around point G, but it does more harm than good. Without giving much away I will say that I found it hard to believe that Joan, as the great Glenn Close plays her, would never attempt to get published just because some embittered alumna scared her. Yes, it may have been harder for women to make it as writers, but they have done it - going way back to Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. The filmmakers seem to imply that she just loved her husband that much. Except I found the young Joe so unlikable, that I just couldn't imagine loving that self absorbed, ungrateful shmuck. The old Joe is much more sympathetic. His constant munching on sweets reminded me of my husband. There's good chemistry between the elder actors. But it wasn't enough to sell the story for me.
I feel kind of bad about it, but the character I found the most likable was not Joan, not Joe, not their their son (Max Irons) who spends the entire movie in various degrees of moping, but the supposedly sleazy biographer played by Christian Slater.
