Critics reviews

Christian Slater was the best thing in the movie. I wanted him to pick up one of Pryce’s novels the way he picks up Moby-Dick in Heathers, underline the word “Eskimo,” then murder Pryce and make it look like a suicide.

This faux-literary film is simply intended to undermine the canon and the culture simultaneously. When Close’s Joan tells an over-inquisitive biographer, “Please don’t paint me as a victim, I am much more interesting than that,” her smirk covers the fact that she’s merely reenacting the Fatal Attraction line “I won’t be ignored!”

Importantly, both [The Wife and Eyes Wide Shut] are Christmas confections. The performances are skillful, earnest, even - but the films themselves are black comedies. A little trashy, and a lot of fun.

Au fond, it’s an actors’ film, visually undemanding and at its best when its well-matched pairs are facing off – Close and Slater fencing verbally, or Pryce and Close dashing red-hot recriminations at one another until only one is left standing.

In its mix of subtlety, engagement with real-life contradictions and display of courage (for both the actress and the character), The Wife at once the crowning achievement of a long feminist career and a reminder that Glenn Close deserves not to be thanked in a speech, like Joan is by her husband, but to give her own speech when she collects her golden statuette.

The director Björn Runge, working with the screenwriter Jane Anderson’s adaptation of a novel by Meg Wolitzer, sticks to surfaces that only Close’s performance ever deepens; the stepwise reduction of the pain-seared story to a mystery plot dispels its psychological power.

Because the performances are so calculated, the emotional outbursts on which the story hinges fail to make a dramatic impact. And for a film about a novelist, The Wife conveys very little sense of what it's like to read or write.

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.

It's Close's face, simmering with a storm of contradictions, that haunts the viewer from beginning to end. Though the film could hardly be described as great cinema, Close's perennial look of astonishment and resilience borrows from the misery of the aforementioned women of cinema, and of feminine despair writ large. It commands the action to the point of turning every other screen element into a gratuitous prop.