Glenn Close deserves a trophy for The Wife

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      Starring Glenn Close. Rated 14A

      A movie about who does and doesn’t win prizes and what they really mean, The Wife is itself certain to be the subject of awards contention, with its ironies compounded by the likelihood of its so-called supporting player getting most of the Oscar attention. The helpmate in question is Joan Castleman, a retiring type played by decidedly unretired Glenn Close, who burns with restrained fury in all but the final scene of this well-crafted effort, which manages to be both soothingly old-fashioned and oddly of the moment, even if it is set in the 1990s and before.

      When we meet long-suffering St. Joan, she’s prepping her husband, Joe, a famous American writer played expertly by Welsh-born Jonathan Pryce, late of Game of Thrones and Wolf Hall (but let’s not forget Brazil, shall we?). Joe’s waiting for a fateful phone call from Stockholm, telling him that he’s won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It comes, and they go, trailing doubts, memories, and volatile recriminations in their wake.

      In keeping with his second-greatest-generation status—the two-fisted writers who followed Hemingway and Mailer—this scribe has always been a pompous, philandering cad. As we see in nicely shaped flashbacks, mostly from the buttoned-down ’50s, college-teacher Joe (Harry Lloyd—another Brit, of course) left his first wife for student Joan, played affectingly by Close’s own daughter, Annie Starke. But more than marital fidelity is tested when the elder Castle­mans head to snowbound Sweden.

      Their marriage is hardly a Garden of Eden, but a snake slithers near anyway, in the Christian Slater–like form of Nathaniel Bone, an ambitious journalist whose attempts to write an authorized biography of the Great Man keep getting rebuffed. Like Clare Quilty in Lolita, he sidles close to the principals, hissing unnaturally intimate things in their ears. Although Joe has kept his flirting game alive, somewhat pathetically, the more crucial issue is that of talent. Not his, but Joan’s. Stunted by a perfect storm of sexism and self-doubt, she was a promising writer who gave it all up to raise a family. But did she?

      Swedish director Björn Runge keeps a cool hand on this saturnine take, adapted from Meg Wolitzer’s novel by Jane Anderson—fittingly, a screenwriter for Mad Men and HBO’s Olive Kitteridge. There are a few clunky stretches; most notably, a subplot with Joe’s grown son (Max Irons, actually son of Jeremy) suffering in his shadow is just too obvious to bother with. But as every writer knows, no story is perfect. And the untold bits are what this one’s all about.

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