the wife movie review guardian

She thinks of everything: where his glasses are, when it’s time to take his pills, what he should eat for lunch. After three-plus decades together, the wife anticipates the husband’s needs and meets them before he even realizes he has them—and certainly long before she’d ever consider tending to any needs of her own.

It’s an efficient if unhealthy dynamic that’s kept their marriage humming along through two kids and a grandkid on the way, through bouts of infidelity, through the husband’s spectacular and longstanding literary success and up to his crowning achievement: winning the Nobel Prize.

This should be a joyous occasion for them both, a chance to take a breath and assess with pride the life they’ve built together. Instead, it becomes an opportunity for the wife to confront some uncomfortable, deeply suppressed truths.

That process of achieving clarity is riveting to watch over the course of just a couple of days in “ The Wife .” And as the title character, Glenn Close is subtly devastating, indicating a lifetime of repression and resentment in just the slightest wry smile or withering glance. Close and Jonathan Pryce have crackling chemistry with each other, the two veteran actors enjoying snappy banter and enduring lacerating battles. But while Pryce’s character remains steady in his narcissism and neediness, Close’s undergoes a quietly powerful transformation from self-deprecating spouse to fiery force of nature. The sort of scenery-chewing scenes Close is known for seizing upon take a while to arise, and when they do, they are doozies. But watching the steady build-up to her character’s epiphanies provides a different kind of pleasure.

Swedish director Björn Runge ’s approach is no-nonsense and workmanlike, perhaps to give these esteemed actors room to swagger and shine, but a bit more imagination and artistry wouldn’t have hurt. (“The Wife” is also distractingly, flatly bright.) Working from a script by Jane Anderson , based on the novel by Meg Wolitzer , Runge jumps back in time here and there to provide context for the relationship we see at the film’s start.

It’s 1992 in wealthy coastal Connecticut. Pryce’s Joseph Castleman is awake in the middle of the night, unable to sleep out of nervous anticipation that he might get the call he’s been waiting for from Stockholm. When it finally comes—with the giddy news that he’s this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature—his first instinct is to have his wife, Joan, join them on the line from another phone. She is there to support him, as she always has been, as we’ll learn in vivid and increasingly dramatic detail.

A celebration at the couple’s sprawling home further reveals nuances to their relationship. Joe is holding court with his accomplished, adoring guests; Joan is holding a tray full of champagne flutes to serve them. Their grown son, David ( Max Irons ), an aspiring writer himself inspired by years of bitterness toward his brilliant old man, is quick to point out this disparity.

“I don’t think people give the spouse enough credit,” says Christian Slater , who adds a layer of tension as the sly, would-be biographer trying to insinuate himself into this momentous occasion. But shy Joan, who always looks just right and says just the right thing, is loath to claim any such credit. She doesn’t even want the greatest American writer of his generation to thank her on the world stage.

“I don’t want to be thought of as the long-suffering wife,” she tells Joe as he ponders what to say in his acceptance speech. Once they reach Stockholm, she also doesn’t want to take part in the shopping trips and beauty treatments offered to the Nobel winners’ spouses – all wives, by the way. Awkward interactions between the best of the best in their respective fields provide moments of absurd humor in this rarified setting, as do the many over-the-top displays of adulation. And yet, there’s a simmering undercurrent of unease as Joan’s disquiet swells.

We see the roots of that independent streak in flashbacks to Smith College in 1958, when Joan ( Annie Starke , who nicely mirrors Close’s cadence and mannerisms) was a bright student with great promise and Joe ( Harry Lloyd ) was her charismatic professor – with a wife and an infant daughter at home. Even then, though, we can see her silently listening, taking it all in, reflecting her inner analysis only in slight, tantalizing ways.

“The Wife” gets juicier and juicier as Joan eventually gives voice to all she’s seen and done and unleashes secrets she’s held close for too long. Once she does that, she can finally allow herself to come into her own—and the look on Close’s finely featured face at the finale suggests she’s ready to do just that with a vengeance, and on her own terms. It’s a moment of understated triumph.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series “Ebert Presents At the Movies” opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Christian Slater as Nathaniel Bone
• Glenn Close as Joan Castleman
• Jonathan Pryce as Joe Castleman
• Max Irons as David Castleman
• Björn Runge
• Jane Anderson
• Meg Wolitzer

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Review: ‘The Wife’ Looks Behind the Closed Doors of a Literary Marriage

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By Ben Kenigsberg

• Aug. 16, 2018

“The Wife” pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of spinning a fundamentally literary premise into an intelligent screen drama that unfolds with real juice and suspense. Adapted from Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel , the film pivots on the marriage between a celebrated author, Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), and his wife, Joan (Glenn Close), whose symbiotic relationship has had profound implications for his success.

Joe receives a call informing him that he’s been awarded the Nobel Prize. (The film is set in 1992, when Joe is said to have bumped Bill Clinton off a magazine cover — a detail that underscores a hint of Bill and Hillary allegory throughout.) The bulk of the action unfolds in Stockholm, where Joan keeps Joe in line while he prepares — with his other laureates, all men — to receive the prize. Waiting in the wings, a writer seeking to be Joe’s official biographer (Christian Slater, cast counterintuitively and successfully) picks at family wounds.

Ms. Wolitzer’s metafictional conceit may lose something without Joan’s first-person narration (though perhaps there was a metacinematic correlative — given the focus on how spouses rely on each other, it’s notable the director, Bjorn Runge, is married to his editor, Lena Runge). What the film offers, as flashbacks help to bring tensions between the couple to a boil, is the spectacle of two great actors tearing into meaty material. Mr. Pryce offers a more complex reprise of the Philip Roth archetype he played in “Listen Up Philip,” while Ms. Close sublimely captures her character’s blend of determination and self-effacement.

Rated R for marital wounds. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

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‘The Wife’ Review: Glenn Close’s Spouse Is Mad as Hell in High-Lit Relationship Drama

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

In Swedish director Bjorn Runge’s film version of the 2003 Meg Wolitzer novel, the brilliant Glenn Close plays Joan Castleman, the wife of celebrated author Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), who’s just won the Nobel Prize for literature. For him, the win is better than sex, which the lusty lion enjoys quite a lot even (and especially) outside the bedroom he shares with his wife. For her, however, the triumph sparks a crisis of identity and conscience that builds as the couple arrives in Stockholm. Adoration will be lavished on Joe; meanwhile, Joan takes her accustomed place in his shadow. There’s a secret at the heart of her resentment, of course, though thanks to a canny script by Jane Anderson ( Olive Kitteridge ), it feels perfectly of a piece with what’s happening onscreen. It also doesn’t hurt that, though this portrait of a woman who finds the courage to stand up in a man’s world is set in 1992, this particular story comes at the height of our #TimesUp moment.

But it’s Close who takes it to the next level with a powerfully implosive performance that doubles as an accumulation of details that define a marriage. She never telegraphs Joan’s feelings, letting them unravel slowly as we watch her attend parties as a buildup to the big night. Runge breaks up the present-day scenes with flashbacks to 1958, when Joan — incisively played by Close’s real-life daughter, Annie Starke — is taking a creative writing class at Smith taught by the young Joe (Harry Lloyd). The affair that the professor starts with his mega-talented student culminates when he leaves his wife and baby to marry her. And what of this young woman’s career? “My wife’s not a writer,” the present-day Joe smugly announces to reporters, as Joan sucks up the slight. It’s one more to add to a collection underlined by the Nobel committee’s sexist suggestion that she join the wives of the other male winners on a shopping expedition. And then there’s Joe hotly coming on to a flirty photographer (Karin Franz Korlof) assigned to assist him in Sweden.

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Why the hell does this long-suffering spouse stay with this skirt-chasing narcissist? There are the grown children, of course: Susannah (Alix Wilton Regan), who’s pregnant, and David (Max Irons), a struggling writer waiting in vain for his dad to throw him a crumb of encouragement. But Joan’s reasons for playing the good wife go deeper. The script wisely refuses to lay them out in dialogue. No need. Everything you need to know about Joan comes through in Close’s subtle and simmering portrayal, her eyes a window to a wounded soul. Just don’t call Joan a victim — the star makes it clear that Joe’s wife is nobody’s patsy. There’s a witty scene in which she plays cat-and-mouse with a journalist (Christian Slater, doing human-slime to perfection) eager to write a tell-all bio of the celebrated novelist with or without his permission. She eviscerates the snoop with scalpel-like precision. And her final confrontation with Joe will have you cheering.

Close plays this ignored, pushed-aside woman like a gathering storm, drawing us into the mind and heart of a heroine who’s not going to take it any more. The actress has received six acting nominations without ever winning an Oscar. The Wife, a funny and fierce showcase for her prodigious talents, might just end the drought. You can’t take your eyes off her.

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Glenn Close Grabs the Limelight in “The Wife”

There’s a scene halfway through “The Wife,” a new film directed by Björn Runge and starring Glenn Close, that I felt like I had lived. Close plays Joan Castleman, the wife of an esteemed novelist, Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce). It’s 1992, and she’s in a bar talking to Nathaniel, a nosy literary biographer played by Christian Slater. Her husband is about to receive the Nobel Prize, and Nathaniel has followed the couple all the way to Stockholm to curry favor with them, or perhaps just to root around for the truth.

The truth, he suspects, is that Joe isn’t the literary giant he purports to be—that Joan, in fact, is the genius of the family, and that her role in Joe’s career has amounted to far more than smiling at events and reminding him when to take his medication. As Nathaniel prods over cocktails, Joan fixes a practiced yet warm poker face and fends him off with evasions like “Aren’t you the psychiatrist?” She’s used to people being interested in her husband, but less so in her. She describes herself as “shy,” as someone with very little of interest to say. Nathaniel doesn’t buy it, but he isn’t getting anywhere, either.

When I interviewed Close at last year’s New Yorker Festival , I found myself in a similar position. I wanted to know more about Close’s strange childhood. She was raised in a stone cottage in Greenwich, Connecticut, the daughter of a prominent surgeon. When she was seven, her parents enrolled the family in a conservative religious group called the Moral Re-Armament, which Close has described as a cultlike organization that dictated what she did, wore, and thought. As a teen-ager, she sang with the M.R.A.-affiliated group Up with People, until finally breaking away to study acting at the College of William & Mary. “I think what actually saved me more than anything,” she has said, “was my desire to be an actress.”

Onstage, I nervously broached the topic, reading a quotation in which Close had said that the M.R.A. had made her feel guilty about any “unnatural desire.” “Well, maybe I should say any natural desire,” she interjected. But she quickly put up her defenses. Did having to modify her behavior prepare her at all for being an actress? “That’s . . . a lot to answer,” she said. “You’re totally pulled up from what your roots were and what you loved, and your family is, you know, pulled apart, and these things are imposed on you. And, for a child with the kind of imagination that I had, I of course wanted to be good soldier. And the group became my parent in a way. And it’s very, very destructive.” I asked about Up with People—did she enjoy the performing aspect of it?—and she said that anyone who craved the spotlight was sent to the back, because you weren’t supposed to express individuality. Then she politely but efficiently said that it was too difficult a subject, and that she didn’t remember much anyway.

Close has been such a constant presence in our onscreen lives that it’s easy to forget how little we know about her. She has never fostered much of a celebrity persona, preferring to shape-shift into a remarkable range of characters, tacking between maternal (“The World According to Garp”) and scary (“Fatal Attraction”), between meek (“Albert Nobbs”) and imposing (“Damages”), between casual (“The Big Chill”) and comically high-strung (“101 Dalmatians”). You get the sense that she grabs each character like a fur coat in winter and holds onto it for dear life. The release of “The Wife” has come with chatter that Close may finally win an Oscar, after being nominated six times. There are several reasons for the Oscar talk, one being that publicists are working hard at it. (The “It’s her turn” narrative is time-tested.) But there’s also a sense that Close, like Joan Castleman, hasn’t been given her proper due.

The echoes don’t end there. Like Joan, Close also describes herself as shy, and she has obscured parts of herself—likely, the parts that give her emotional fuel—without ever making her audiences feel unwelcome. In “The Wife,” adapted by Jane Anderson from a novel by Meg Wolitzer , Close shows how much can be expressed through containment, through choosing what not to reveal. Joan begins the film as her husband’s happy-enough helpmate, guiding him through cocktail parties and jumping on the bed when he gets the news from Stockholm. (I thought of Torvald, in “A Doll’s House,” calling Nora “my little squirrel.”) The Nobel Prize begins to crack her reserve, as the desire for recognition dawns on her. She asks Joe not to thank her in his speech, because she doesn’t want to be thought of as the “long-suffering wife.” When he thanks her anyway, with glowing gratitude, she explodes. It’s too much, and far too little.

As a feminist parable, “The Wife” has plenty to say about the ways in which women are expected to be self-effacing, while men are taught to bask in achievement—even ones that aren’t entirely theirs. Flashbacks reveal Joan’s entrée into writing, as Joe’s student at Smith, and the reasons she felt she could never succeed as a “woman author.” The flashback scenes are fine, if on the nose, and the film’s conclusion is too eventful to be believed. But it doesn’t give us quite what we’re expecting, either, instead letting Close play Joan’s ambiguity, her cleverness, and, finally, her will. “The Wife” is the story of a woman’s relationship with attention, and the power in being able to choose when and why to be visible—or invisible. For more than three decades, Close has found a way to be both at once.

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Common Sense Media Review

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Wife is a drama geared toward adults about the longtime spouse (Glenn Close) of a newly minted Nobel Prize winner (Jonathan Pryce) -- and the secrets and resentments bubbling beneath the surface of their outwardly happy marriage. It deals with mature themes including infidelity…

Why Age 15+?

Frequent use of "f--k" and variants. With less frequency: "s--t," "c--k," "Jesus

A sexual encounter between a married couple includes lots of dirty talk. A marri

Drinking and smoking at parties, bars, cafés, and high-end galas. No one is show

Brief physical confrontation between a father and his adult son. An elderly man

Any Positive Content?

The truth will out -- and it will set you free. Compromising your dreams is like

Joan is extraordinarily smart, talented, and capable. After spending decades liv

Frequent use of "f--k" and variants. With less frequency: "s--t," "c--k," "Jesus f---ing Christ," and "goddamn."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A sexual encounter between a married couple includes lots of dirty talk. A married professor has multiple affairs (more discussed than shown) and flirts with an attractive student.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Drinking and smoking at parties, bars, cafés, and high-end galas. No one is shown drunk. Discussion of an adult man smelling like pot. A pregnant woman is encouraged to drink champagne.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Brief physical confrontation between a father and his adult son. An elderly man suffers a serious cardiac event. Yelling/arguing, with bitter recriminations.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

The truth will out -- and it will set you free. Compromising your dreams is likely to leave you bitter and resentful. Believe in yourself and don't let others' opinions of your chances of success define you.

Positive Role Models

Joan is extraordinarily smart, talented, and capable. After spending decades living a lie, she's ready to tell the truth and see where that takes her. But she's also been complicit in the situation she so despises. Joe is a flawed, selfish man who does love his wife but apparently not enough to overcome his baser urges and pride.

Parents need to know that The Wife is a drama geared toward adults about the longtime spouse ( Glenn Close ) of a newly minted Nobel Prize winner ( Jonathan Pryce ) -- and the secrets and resentments bubbling beneath the surface of their outwardly happy marriage. It deals with mature themes including infidelity and is decidedly mature in tone. Characters drink and smoke and discuss drug use; there's also flirting, kissing, and a non-explicit sex scene with a fair bit of dirty talk. Language includes frequent use of "f--k" and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (1)

Based on 3 parent reviews

What's the Story?

In THE WIFE, heralded writer Joe Castleman ( Jonathan Pryce ) and his wife, Joan ( Glenn Close ), wake early one morning to the news that he has won the Nobel Prize. With their sullen, aspiring-writer son David ( Max Irons ) in tow and haunted by a pesky would-be biographer ( Christian Slater ), the couple go to Stockholm for the ceremony. But the trip unearths long-held resentments and deep, dark secrets as Joan comes to grips with the truth of her feelings about the last several decades of her life. It's an exploration of the bubbling inner life of the "woman behind the great man," with a significant spoiler twist.

Is It Any Good?

This uneven drama is elevated by Close's award-worthy lead performance. The Wife is guided by a clear intelligence from the page (Jane Anderson adapted it from Meg Wolitzer's novel), which can be both delightful and awkward. The same characters who describe genitalia as "tumescent" or complain of "agita" seem to have trouble spitting out "f--k" (though they still do it quite often). Nail-on-head exchanges add to the "on the page" feeling of the material, as when a male editor in a 1960s publishing house says a manuscript is "great," but it's by a "lady writer" and "from the point of view of this woman," so they move on. Perhaps as a result, some of the performances are conveyed in large gestures … but not by Close. Never by Close.

The decorated veteran delivers one of the finest performances of her storied career as Joan. There's no visible effort to convince us of anything; She simply is that person. Her inner life is remarkable. We see the cracks develop. We see her awakening. For connoisseurs of acting, what Close delivers is a feast. She's loving and resentful and supportive and repressed and fiercely intelligent and bursting to break free. Where, for instance, Slater's fine work is sometimes hamstrung by, shall we say, a lack of subtlety in the writing (not in his acting -- observe his intrusive body language as he speaks ingratiatingly), in the lead, Close hums right over the top of it all. She becomes this fascinating woman.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the strong language in The Wife . Did it surprise you to hear characters like these swearing, or did it make them seem more human and the film more realistic? Did the dialogue in general seem believable to you? Why or why not?

Joan is in a prison of sorts. Why do you think she agreed to her arrangement with Joe? Do you think, as things changed over the years, that she could have gotten out of it? Do you consider her a role model ?

What do you take away from Joan and Joe's relationship? Did they need each other equally? Did they love each other, as you understand love to be?

What is the movie's message about believing in yourself and pursuing your dreams? Why did Joan let others discourage her in her youth?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 17, 2018
• On DVD or streaming : January 29, 2019
• Cast : Glenn Close , Jonathan Pryce , Christian Slater , Max Irons
• Director : Björn Runge
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Sony Pictures Classics
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Book Characters
• Run time : 100 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language and some sexual content
• Award : Golden Globe - Golden Globe Award Winner
• Last updated : June 20, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

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The Wife Review

28 Sep 2018

In a career spanning four decades, Glenn Close has played a number of wildly varied roles, earning six Oscar nominations (three for Best Supporting Actress, followed by three for lead) without yet snagging a win. If larger-than-life characters such as Cruella de Vil made Hollywood forget she achieved early acclaim playing real people in the likes of The Big Chill and The Natural , The Wife will serve as a welcome reminder.

The film, adapted from Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel, opens in the 1990s with an epic eye-roll from Close’s Joan as her husband Joe ( Pryce ) pesters her for sex, while they await the call from the Nobel committee that will seal his status as one of the greats. News of the award reinvigorates the ambitions of Joe’s smooth-talking biographer ( Slater on seductive form), who has been raking over the coals of their lives, and seems determined to expose not only Joe’s many infidelities, but also other, far more damaging, secrets.

Glenn Close gives a performance that demands the Oscar voters consider her for a seventh time.

This is teased out through flashbacks to the early 1960s, when young Joe ( Harry Lloyd ) and Joan (Annie Starke) meet for the first time. Back then, he was an unhappily married literature professor with a child and an unborn first novel, while Joan was his student and an aspiring writer. An affair was almost inevitable — and arguably vital in order for Joe to blossom into the writer he became, while Joan’s own literary aspirations were ultimately eclipsed by Joe’s success.

Such archetypes could easily be the stuff of cliché or melodrama, but Wolitzer is much too clever to gravitate towards obvious tropes, etching characters of subtlety and nuance, and taking them in unexpected directions. Likewise, Emmy-winning screenwriter Jane Anderson (HBO’s Olive Kitteridge ) expertly navigates its narratively tricksy structure, while Swedish director Björn Runge does a good job of evoking the twin period settings (a shot of Concorde in flight proves surprisingly emotional) as well as the pomp and self-importance of the Nobel ceremony. And when Close and Pryce are going at it like Burton and Taylor in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? , he mostly has the good sense to sit back and give the actors room to shine.

The film does have one problem the book doesn’t, however: so magnetic are the two leads, there’s a massive energy drain every time the narrative flashes back to the 1960s. It’s not necessarily the fault of the actors playing young Joe and Joan; nonetheless, you can’t wait to be back with their older selves. But such lulls are a small price to pay for the sheer magnitude of the performances that power the film.

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