The Wife

In Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 classic Wild Strawberries, an elderly professor reexamines the compromises and disappointments of his life while traveling to receive a career-capping honor from his old university. Since then, many movies have reused the road trip-as-psychotherapy trope of Wild Strawberries, including several films from Woody Allen alone (most notably Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry), but rarely have the strawberries been less wild than in The Wife. Directed by Björn Runge (Happy End) and adapted by Jane Anderson (The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio) from Meg Wolitzer’s novel of the same name, The Wife returns the trope to its native Sweden, as a revered writer (Jonathan Pryce) and his oft-overshadowed wife (Glenn Close) travel to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize. However, the quasi-august The Wife contributes little else to the subgenre besides two very good performances and a multitude of credibility-straining plot twists.