The Wife

A couple is awake before dawn. The husband is nervous, waiting for a call. The call comes--he has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He and his wife celebrate. So begins The Wife, an excellent film from director Bjorn Runge, which then covers the time the winner, Jonathan Pryce, and his supportive wife, Glenn Close, visit Stockholm for the ceremony.

In between, we get flashbacks of how they met. He was a professor and she was a student at Smith College. He was married, but leaves his wife for her, and she is the living example of the saying "behind every great man is a woman." She gives up writing to be his muse, even going so far as to get him published, as she works as a secretary at a publishing house and suggests him to one of the editors, who bemoans that they don't have a Jewish writer.

This film is all about Glenn Close. She is the one who wanted to adapt the Meg Wolitzer novel into a film, and stars as the patient and mysterious wife. The film was first seen over a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, and people have since penciled her in as not only an Oscar nominee but a likely winner. It's the perfect combination of a well-rounded role--some intense outbursts, but mostly subtlety--and a woman who has been nominated six times before without ever winning.

That's not to say she's the only good thing about the film. Pryce is also very good, as a pampered man who is very used to being called a genius. His scenes with Close are like watching two great tennis players in an extended rally. They also have a son (Max Irons, son of Jeremy), who is a mess, a would-be writer who suffers from feeling unable of ever being able to match his father.

The Wife is set in 1992, and was not updated because it has to have the flashbacks in a particular time, 1958, when women writers were not taken seriously. There were some who achieved great success--I can think of Mary McCarthy and Ayn Rand as just a couple, but they were the exceptions. Those were the days when women went to college to meet their husbands. A brief but memorable scene with Elizabeth McGovern as a novelist stands out. She tells the young woman (played by Annie Starke, Close's real-life daughter) not to write.

Hanging over The Wife is a twist that maybe some will get before I did. A biographer, Christian Slater, hovers around the couple in Stockholm. Pryce has refused to authorize his biography, but Slater will write it anyway, and he has a theory that I won't go into here. But it becomes the crux of the final act of the film. As with any good ending, it is unpredictable but inevitable.

"I am a kingmaker," Close tells the King of Sweden when he asks her if she an occupation. She is probably also an Oscar winner, if only for the scene in which she registers emotion on her face without speaking as Pryce thanks her in his acceptance speech. Slater tells her, "That's what makes you so attractive--you're so mysterious." This is Close's best work since Dangerous Liaisons, thirty years ago, for which she should have won an Oscar. Sometimes Oscar is slow to make things right---look at the 41 years Henry Fonda had to wait for the Oscar he should have won for The Grapes of Wrath. But her time will come this February.