Glenn Close is Joan, the titular wife of Nobel prize winner, writer Joe. The couple, with their moody son David, travel to Stockholm for the ceremony, but what should be a happy event turns into the unravelling of all their secrets.
Close as Joan, plays a type of passive-aggressive character I personally despise. She does a good job, but that did not make me like Joan a bit more.
With a perennial fake smile frozen on her lips, Joan is the quintessential wronged wife who sticks to her philandering husband for reasons impossible to understand.
Theirs seems to be a relationship based on lies and deception from the very beginning. Their life together is an exploitation of each other and a mountain of lies, not only to the public in general but also to their children.
Also, the feminist twist of the plot failed to impress me. Joan allegedly gave up writing in the 50s, because "lady writers" were mocked by publishers, but we all know that lady writers always had a public and many of them wrote with great success even in earlier years (think Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Parker and countless others).
Joan is just a coward who blames anybody else and society at large, for her failure. Should we feel sympathetic? Probably many will, because she fits in beautifully with our society of whiners.
Close as Joan, plays a type of passive-aggressive character I personally despise. She does a good job, but that did not make me like Joan a bit more.
With a perennial fake smile frozen on her lips, Joan is the quintessential wronged wife who sticks to her philandering husband for reasons impossible to understand.
Theirs seems to be a relationship based on lies and deception from the very beginning. Their life together is an exploitation of each other and a mountain of lies, not only to the public in general but also to their children.
Also, the feminist twist of the plot failed to impress me. Joan allegedly gave up writing in the 50s, because "lady writers" were mocked by publishers, but we all know that lady writers always had a public and many of them wrote with great success even in earlier years (think Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Parker and countless others).
Joan is just a coward who blames anybody else and society at large, for her failure. Should we feel sympathetic? Probably many will, because she fits in beautifully with our society of whiners.