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One of the blessings and obsessions of the cinematic eye is intensely observing the faces of great actors telegraphing conflicting emotions through the subtlest movements. It’s in the way a mouth may tighten while the eyes are trying to look soft and kind, or the terse body language that contrasts with the words coming out of the mouth. Sometimes it’s the silences that are filled with so much palpable tension as the emotional undercurrents spark off the actor’s face.
What I’m really talking around here is that these faces are frequently of the feminine persuasion. Ingrid Bergman’s emotional unease in Casablanca sustains several quiet moments with electricity. Greta Garbo’s Queen Christina is justifiably famous for its ending that zooms in on her face alternating between heartbreak, totemic solemnity, and romantic poetry. Then there’s the entirety of The Passion of Joan of Arc which obsessively caresses Renée Falconetti’s face as it traverses from frightened youth to blessed martyr.
Behold, The Wife and the chance to watch Glenn Close give an interior, subtle performance that makes you want to throw a shoe it’s so good. The rest of the movie is not quite up to her level, but it’s never an outright bomb. The Wife mistakes the audience’s intelligence to understand what Close’s masterful performance is doing that it must speak loudly what she’s already communicated quietly.
Close’s work places itself in the same hallway as those classic films, but the rest of the film is decided lesser. There’s too many subplots and diversions away from the central core of the film – the secrets, resentments, and deferments involved in the marriage between Close and Jonathan Pryce, scheduled to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. There’s more than another drama there to sustain the narrative, but The Wife throws in Christian Slater as unauthorized biographer who exists merely to create flareups and a scene in flashback with Elizabeth McGovern as a jaded female author. These moments are too on the nose and literal when Close has already expressed it so much better.
