The Wife is apparently a warning to all those potential Nobel Prize winners. If you end up winning the grand prize, your life’s work may consume and overtake your family, causing all your secrets to ooze out, like from a wound. In The Wife, it would appear Glenn Close will no longer be helping mend Jonathan Price’s Nobel related wounds anymore.
Jonathan Pryce plays Joe Castelman, a famous novelist whose career has finally reached its pinnacle, receiving a call from the Nobel committee very early in the morning with his wife, Joan (Close). The two, accompanied by their son David (Max Irons), head to Stockholm in December for Joe to accept the prize. Also accompanying them, like a fly, is Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), a novelist himself who desires to write Joe’s biography.
The Wife is built as Glenn Close’s “For Your Consideration” montage at the 2019 Oscar Ceremony. The talented actress gives a stellar performance as The Wife. In public, she’s playing the perfect dutiful wife of a literary genius: warm, welcoming, deferential, clever, and capable of holding her own intellectually with anyone. However, you’re clearly supposed to see something bubbling beneath the surface of every public moment she has. There appears to be genuine happiness…but for whom or what exactly? And why does the exasperation grow with each new public appearance? Then, once the cameras go away, her layers peel away, and we find a woman who’s grown stronger in her old age. Also, her voice in these private moments becomes equal to her husband’s, and very often surpasses his. In flashbacks (young Joan is played by Glenn Close’s real life daughter, Annie Starke), we see Joan was not always this way: she was a meek woman enthralled by her teacher (Joe), wanting desperately to be a serious writer. While fairly cliched, these scenes provide necessary context for present day Joan’s predicament and perpetual internal conflicts: desiring the limelight but unsure of her own talents and what she brings to the table. As we reach the end of the Nobel ceremony, Joan’s real feelings are barely being held back by her facade, realizing her life’s work will be complete after this moment. Joe, as much as he wants to stay in the moment, begins to realize that Joan will simply not let that happen anymore, and, now that power dynamics are equal, there’s nothing he can do to stop her. Glenn Close carries all this emotion in her facial expressions and her actions, showing so many faces sometimes it’s hard to actually know what she’s thinking, a testament to Close’s prodigious talents.
As the great saying once said: “Behind every great man there’s a greater woman.” No truer words have been said for The Wife. Glenn Close has us all wrapped around her finger the minute she steps on screen. In her own words, she will not be ignored!