Behind every great man …

Glenn Close has the title role in this broodingly turbulent double portrait. Adapted from a 2003 novel by Meg Wolitzer, The Wife focuses on the marital drama and family turmoil that ensue when American novelist Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) wins the Nobel Prize for literature and, with his wife and literary partner, Joan (Close), heads off to Stockholm for the official award ceremony.

Joe is clearly both devoted to and dependent on Joan, and Joan seems even more deeply devoted to John and his career, but his dependency and the illusions that go with it have begun to wear gratingly thin. An obnoxiously nosy writer (Christian Slater) who claims he wants to write a biography of Joe baits Joan with the notion that she’s the actual author of Joe’s prize-winning works, and that provokes an intensely snarled identity crisis.

Close is excellent in her moment-to-moment portrait of a woman whose entire adult life seems to have been a ferocious swirl of ambition (both personal and literary) wrapped in the guise of a genuinely supportive wife and helpmeet. And Jane Anderson’s screenplay adaptation of Wolitzer’s novel takes special care to indicate that while Joan plainly seems, in some ways, a victim of a male-dominated world, she also thrives, up to a point, in some of the more conventional roles that have been thrust upon her.

Literary passions loom large, and in somewhat perversely convoluted ways, with both Joan and Joe. But their contrasting emotional investments in family life, however flawed, count for something of value in The Wife as well. Their discouraged-looking son David (Max Irons) is a fledgling writer caught in a kind of Oedipal triangle of encouragement and disapproval. Their adult daughter Susannah (Alix Wilton Regan) is about to give birth to a child whose arrival will temporarily turn both Joe and Joan into generically doting grandparents.

Intermittent flashbacks show us how Joe and Joan first got together, via a teacher-student college romance that helped finish off Joe’s first marriage. But the overriding question of what drew these two together in the first place, a question they ask themselves in the midst of one of their midlife squabbles, gets a rather incomplete answer from the film as a whole.

Pryce has no trouble with the bumbling blowhard part of Joe’s character but has little else to offer. Slater is mostly just annoying in a patently annoying role. Elizabeth McGovern is a weirdly twisted caricature as the “famous woman writer” who gives the young Joan some crucial and cynical advice.

But Close is very good, and the story is uniquely intriguing. And that’s more than enough to make The Wife worth seeing.Ω