The Roses (15) |Close-Up Film Review

This is an update of the 1989 film War of the Roses, which starred  Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas as a divorcing couple at war with each other and was  directed by and co-starred Danny DeVito.  The film was based on a novel of the same name by Warren Adlerand.

 I mention all that because this new version has moved quite some way from the previous one.  Directed by American Jay Roach, although set in California, it was largely  filmed in Devon and it stars British actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as the battling couple.  And that mixed heritage is a bit of a problem.   The whole set up doesn’t quite ring true.

The film starts off well.   We first meet Ivy and Theo Rose (that’s Colman and Cumberbatch) when they’re in couples counselling in California.  All the earnest young woman’s question elicits from them are smart arse replies and a fit of the mutual giggles, illustrating how much they still have in common.  Shortly afterwards we see their first meeting twenty years earlier, in the restaurant kitchen in London where Ivy is working.  Their mutual attraction is instant, which is hardly surprising as the film’s makeup artist has managed to return 50 something Coleman to looking 20 something and totally gorgeous.

However fate or rather his career take them to California, where architect Theo has been asked to design a contemporary museum.  When the damn thing collapses in a storm, so does his career.  But meanwhile Ivy’s humble little restaurant, cheekily named “We’ve Got Crabs”, has attracted media attention.  Her star reputation and pay packet as a celebrity chef are both on the rise – and their marriage starts to suffer.

To try to save it, Ivy, with her new found wealth, buys a beautiful slice of Californian landscape for Theo to build their dream home.   When it’s finally finished it’s the ultimate – but meanwhile the change in their domestic roles is murdering the marriage.  She’s the career success, he’s the house husband, trying to turn their children into sports champions.  The house though,(built incidentally on the set at Pinewood in England) which she has  bankrolled, is the ultimate in Californian modernist ostentation.  It’s dead flashy and rather tasteless but they both lay claim to it. 

In their scenes together Colman and Cumberbatch are reliably sharp and funny.   The problem for the film and possibly the marriage is its depiction of the Californian lifestyle.  The people around them are a self indulgent, over privileged pain.  Their closest friends are Amy (Kate McKinnon) and Barry (Andy Samberg), an ill-matched, self satisfied couple.  She’s a frustrated nymphomaniac, he’s a bore.   There’s also another annoying couple in the group who make little impression.  They are all such a pain that when Ivy is serving a complex dessert at a dinner party to celebrate the new house – the climax to a meal during which  she and Theo have been knocking verbal chunks off each other – the guests get so annoying that she destroys her creation to throw handfuls of it at them.  I’m with her there.

There is though one bright American spark and that is Alison Janney as Ivy’s divorce lawyer, who brings her fierce looking dog to the negotiation meeting.   Only the one scene in which they are both scary as hell and twice as funny.  It’s a pity really that Roach didn’t stick more closely to the first film, where the divorce lawyer, played then by DeVito, had a much bigger role.  We’d then have had more of Janney to liven things up.

As it is, the Anglo-American treatment of the film fails to gel. It might have worked better if Roach and his British screenwriter Tony McNamara had either reconceived it as a totally British story set in Hampstead say or alternatively gone for a totally American Meet the Fockers type comedy.   As it is we have two strong performers relishing their scenes together but trapped in what is a glossy but uncomfortable alliance of a movie.