FILM: The Wife

We had missed this last fall, but with Oscar nominations out, it's back on the big screen, and I'm glad we got the chance to see it. Everyone has been buzzing about Glenn Close's performance in The Wife, and rightly so. Jonathan Pryce is also brilliant as her husband, the Nobel-winning writer, but even if the title hadn't clued us in that we should be watching her, Close's character Joan, tautly rendered and slowly revealed, would command our attention. This fascinating character story examines what it takes to be a great writer, but examines it by showing us this moment of winning the Nobel, and the life that lead up to it. One of the scenes, where Joan spontaneously agrees to have a drink with a persistent would-be biographer (Christian Bale) who is trying to wheedle dirt out of her, reminded me of a similar scene from years ago of Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck, where she rebuffs a proposed affair, "because I know who I am."  Likewise, Joan knows who she is. There's a writerly line from James Joyce that crops up a few times in this film, "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."  The film culminates in Stockholm in December for the Nobel ceremony, and there are just enough graceful set shots of the stark beauty of that city in winter. In a shot near the end, there is a close-up of Joan's face, and through the window behind her, we see the snow falling faintly, just the way Joyce said it would. I haven't read the book that this film came from, but I'm sure it must have been quite a job to adapt such inherently literary, non-cinematic material. Yet it is deftly done, with fine acting conveying much beyond the words.