THE WIFE

So the plot may be predictable and the ending a little too tidy but there are other things that can hold you in a vice-like grip at the movies. Perhaps you do need a director who knows what he's doing and a screenplay that doesn't insult our intelligence and "The Wife" certainly has both but the real pleasure to be had from this movie lies elsewhere. I have often said great acting is its own reward and this predictable and tidy film is blessed with, not one, but two great performances, (and several very good ones from among the supporting cast).

It is a love story and it's about a woman who has lived in her husband's shadow. He is a writer and he has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature and she is a former student who has become his second wife. They are played by Glenn Close, the wife, and Jonathan Pryce, the prize-winning husband, and they are both magnificent. Indeed, I don't think Close has ever been this good before. Her downward glances, (modesty or maybe something else?), her silences are devastating. She is a woman with secrets, a bomb that might explode at any moment or one that may have been diffused years before. Close draws us in to this woman's hidden world and keeps us guessing. This is great acting indeed.

Pryce, too, matches her; an obvious adulterer and not the most likeable of men, his bombast and his bonhomie nevertheless seems false. He also has his secrets and the pleasure one gets from watching them together really is enormous. There are flashbacks to their earlier lives; he is played then, and very well, by Harry Lloyd and she is played by Close's real-life daughter Annie Starke. They also have a son, an aspiring writer beautifully played by Max Irons, also living in the shadow of his more famous prize-winning father just as Irons has lived in the shadow of his own more famous Oscar-winning father, (was he cast for this very reason?), and Christian Slater is excellent as Pryce's slimey, would-be and very unofficial biographer.

Of course, without the intelligence of the dialogue and the probing direction of Bjorn Runge neither lead might have risen to the occasion but rise they have. It's rare today to see a mainstream film that holds you, not by action but by words and by what the performers bring to the table. Close certainly deserves an Oscar but so, too, does Pryce. This is one film that really must be seen.