Review: THE WIFE

Melodrama is too much maligned, dismissed as cheaply emotive but without it we don't get the great American films of master Douglas Sirk, a lot of '50s Hollywood, the British kitchen sink realism of the '60s, that's before you get to silent cinema which required an appreciation of melodrama on the part of its audiences to work at all. As I see it, melodrama in cinema is a moral setting against which the emotional conflicts are given licence to bloom. The Wife is a story in which the secret of a marriage and literary career burns slowly and then quickly and brightly until you almost hold your breath for the explosion you know is coming. It's a good example of a contemporary melodrama.

Glenn Close is the wife of the title. Her husband, narcissistic and wayward, has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. They trampoline on the mattress, hand in hand, singing:"I won the Nobel. I won the Nobel" until she trails off and leaves the room on a pretext of something familial. Thereafter, through the first two acts, each time he speaks about the prize publicly the camera's gaze shifts from his anodyne glow to his wife's increasingly strained loyalty smile. We get many indicators that he, Joe (Jonathon Pryce) is a monstrous father, having a history of affairs, making a clear and humiliating preference for his daughter over his son in the presence of both, and carrying the secret that is telescoped in a very early scene: did she, Joan (Glenn Close) sacrifice her own writing career to support his or does it go deeper into ghost writing of his works which have delivered him the apex of literary recognition?

Most of the story is set outside the comfort of their home in America, in the salubrious surrounds of ceremonial buildings and five star hotels in Stockholm so they are on notice to perform for the public as the private shaking resentment festers in Joan's bosom. She must sit beside Swedish royalty as her husband pays her the kind of tribute given the long suffering rather than reveal the truth. How will this end?

I first remember Glenn Close as the self sacrificing earth mother in The Big Chill where she quietly commanded the self-licencing gaggle of old friends until giving up her husband for a single night to another woman. She did a lot of those. But the turn she made of her role in the retro-ethical Fatal Attraction or the end title sequence of Dangerous Liaisons where she scrapes away the powder and makeup of her doomed aristocracy are what I recall her for most of all and they are the ancestors of this one. This is a melodrama so it is allowed to emote beyond the bounds of naturalism but that doesn't mean overacting here, it means clarity. Close's wise and durable beauty is stretched to breaking with anger but restrained by her sense of the order of things. Pressed to a detonating fury in the third act, she knows the effect she has been fearing this will have is happening before her eyes and, after an extraordinary circular parallel track on her face against the gaudy coloured wall as it moves in sickly patterns behind her, she knows how she must end it. So do you and, whether you'll admit it or not, that's why you like melodrama.