Posted by I stumbled upon Björn Runge’s directorial, The Wife (2017), through a movie reel. The reel showed a gripping marital discord scene between Glenn Close (Mrs Joan Castleman) and Jonathan Pryce (Mr Castleman). You know, when award-winning legends like these two come on screen to paint a cryptic marriage of 40 years, there is going to be some jaw-dropping acting. When you reach the movie’s climax, you know exactly why you sat through 100 minutes of ripples of marital drama.
The movie kicks off in 1958 when Joan, a young, jubilant yet brooding writer in the making at Smith College, submits a story to her professor Joe. Here they fall in love in a predictable English literature classroom over Yeats, Byron and other heroes of romanticism. But it is not the young love that gravitates you. The movie’s uniqueness lies in making you gravitate towards the love/marriage life of two, almost 40 years later.
Back in 1992, we see a wrinkly old couple who seem too anxious to sleep. But soon, the phone rings and as seen in every other movie featuring a Nobel Prize winner, with bated breath, Joe and Joan learns that Joe has received the Nobel prize in Literature for his astounding body of work.
Joe and Joan are then seen doing their celebratory hopping on the mattress while joining hands. It makes our hearts warm. Joe also never misses a chance to display his love, affection and appreciation toward Joan at the family and friends gathering. You now wonder what the catch is? It is only in the second half when a distraught, low self-esteemed David (their second born) enters the scene that you realise there is more depth to this family soup. That’s when the first cracks appear in your mind as a viewer, and you realise Joe is not the angel he paints himself to be. Jane Anderson’s storyline, based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Meg Wolitzer, cleverly peels away the layers to make you realise that Joe’s affection is akin to a man appreciating his golden egg-laying goose.
That’s when you realise that every word of love shared is actually an entrapment painted to make Joan feel guilty of ever doubting him, but never really giving her the credit or presence she demands. The classic definition of gaslighting.
At the family introductions between the laureates, Joe cleverly sidelines Joan when getting introduced to the Economic laureate and his shining family of scientists and academics. Later, Joan thunders at Joe, ‘Your wife who does not write??’. It is at this stage that we are wittily given a hint that Joe’s literary genius before the world rests on Joan’s wordsmithery.
We are all aware that historically women faced immense difficulties in penning novel, essays or even articles under their own name. The movie once again manifests it, but this time the force at play was the literary failure of a man who wanted to be known as a writer and had no shame or guilt in gaslighting his wife to write under his name. You almost wonder what stopped Joan from claiming her limelight. This is never revealed to us. he movie eventually reverberated in my mind Cruella’s words,
“More good women have been lost to marriage than to war, famine, disease, and disaster. You have talent, darling. Don’t squander it.”
Cruella Di Ville, 101 Dalmations