The Wife

Joan (Glenn Close) is a good wife - supportive, clever and naturally beautiful, she stands by her husband, the writer Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce). However, you could also say in his shadow. In truth, Joan has been sacrificing her dreams and ambitions at the altar of her marriage for forty years. But now, in her late 60s, Joan is increasingly reaching her limits: Tensions between the couple come to a head during their trip to London to attend Joe's Nobel Prize award ceremony, while their son (Max Irons) threatens to fail because of his own literary ambitions. And the wife of the future Nobel Prize winner decides to reveal her best-kept secret... Björn Runge's film adaptation of Meg Wolitzer's novel of the same name proves to be a sensitive, psychologically dense drama about a lack of recognition, self-abandonment and the invisibility of female creativity. As the main and title character, Glenn Close (“Albert Nobbs”) shines in the role of the sophisticated wife whose silent rage slowly breaks through a thick layer of self-control. The nuanced portrayal of Joan Castleman not only earned Glenn Close much praise, but also a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination. She is flanked by two equally talented male actors: Jonathan Pryce and Christian Slater as a curious investigative biographer. With “The Wife”, director Runge has succeeded in creating a quiet but powerful reckoning with patriarchal structures and a haunting portrait of a woman who has stood in the background for far too long - and now finally dares to step into the light herself. "This bittersweet drama about the abysses of a couple of artists sketches the dynamics of a creative relationship as grippingly as precisely, whereby the film not only identifies the social conditions of the mid-20th century, but also the individual characters as central factors. Even in the flashbacks to the 1960s, the production relies on the smallest gestures and nuances that allow for an extremely differentiated interpretation. - Worth seeing" (Lexikon des Internationalen Films)