~ The Wife: Book and Movie ~
As a college student at Smith, Joan falls for her married professor, Joe Castleman, fascinated by his brilliance.
It kills me to say it, but I was his student when we met. There we were in 1956, a typical couple, Joe intense and focused and tweedy, me a fluttering budgie circling him again and again. [..] I felt honored to have been chosen by him.
Joe leaves his wife and child to marry her, and she nurtures his talent, career, and their children thereafter while he shoots up the literary ladder. Or so the public perception goes, but both Joan and her marriage have hidden layers.
In The Wife, Meg Wolitzer lays out the life and motivations of a wonderful character, and does so with perceptiveness and her trademark elegant style. When the book opens, Joan and Joe are an elderly couple, on their way to Finland for Joe to accept The Helskinki Prize, second only to the Nobel. Joan has just decided to leave her husband after 35 years of marriage and three children. But why? Slowly, between flashbacks and the present, the reason becomes clear.
Glenn Close is fantastic as Joan, in the film directed by Björn Runge. In her 70s, the actress has a strong, calm, thoughtful face, and can express subtle, fleeting, and deep emotions. She portrays the gentle competence of a 1950s housewife to perfection, and as the film develops, reveals hints of the anger within. She smiles benevolently by Joe’s side, says little, exudes dignity, and keeps an eye on Joe’s comfort at all times. Yet, there is a core of steel, ever so subtly displayed in a momentary twitch of the lips here and there, that suggest there is more to Joan than meets the eye. She carries the film.
The other characters are rather one-note: the blustering husband, the rebellious angry son, the sneaky biographer.
The book is more nuanced than the film, as is generally the case. Some simplifications are worthwhile: for example, in the film, Joe simply wins the Nobel, avoiding the additional overhead of describing the Helsinki Prize and Finland.
Other short cuts in the film are a loss. One is the story of their son David. In both the book and film he is a troubled, angry soul. In the film, this is entirely explained by his anger at what his mother has sacrificed and his father’s condescension (why, then, does he come for the Prize event at all?). Max Irons (son of Jeremy) gives a good performance as David, but his rage always seems a bit childish and inexplicable. In the book, David is a difficult, remote, brilliant child who has anger issues, moves from school to school, and ends up, briefly in prison; he has problems long before he could have a sophisticated understanding of his parents’ relationship. When he does understand, his anger is expressed physically and emotionally, and this makes much more sense.
The largest simplification in the film is the reason for Joan’s resentment. In the film, her own participation in the deception is harder to understand. In the novel, her multiple reasons and rationalizations are laid out, and you can see how she slides into the scheme, part actively, part not.
The story was like an imitation of something literary, made by someone who hadn’t developed a distinctive voice of his own.
“Yes”, I said brightly. “I loved it,” I told him. It was easy to say that.
Women writers were not taken seriously, as a visiting writer had informed Joan.
She, and one or two other, lesser female literary lights had a demeanor that lit a fire beneath their brilliance and gave it style, allowing them to slip through the swinging doors that were clearly etched with the word MEN. But what happened to the talented women who lacked sharp cheekbones or an ease in the universe? The ones who had no attachment to powerful men?
After their affair is discovered and Joan and Joe run away together, Joe’s writing becomes the only possible source of income:
I didn’t have the same fever to write that he did. […] Now that we were in New York, we talked only of his writing, and I didn’t mind. I didn’t think I had too much to say and even if I had, Elaine Mozell had assured me of the futility of saying it.
The film’s scenes from their college days, where Joe the unhappily married professor seduces the young student Joan (played by Glenn Close’s real-life daughter, Annie Starke), are very well done.
In the end, the film falls slightly flat. It makes its points about women writers getting less attention from male publishers, and poorer reviews from male reviewers. Joan’s decision seem reasonable. But if she’s put up with the popular adulation of her husband and her own back seat for all these years, why does The Prize put her over the edge?
Perhaps the missing layer is that the elderly Joe is so dull, such a man-baby. Few redeeming characteristics are visible to the viewer, and this makes it hard to understand why Joan stayed with him for so long. As described in the novel he is charming and exudes sex appeal, but this didn’t come through in the film.
The Wife, by Meg Wolitzer. 2004
The Wife: film directed by Björn Runge, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. 2017
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