Review of The Wife

Without the two leads, there is no reason to watch this flick. The absurd premise that female writers are not read ignores the history of the Bronte sisters, Edith Wharton, Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind) and many other women writers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Addtionally, the history of nom de plume (George Sands, George Eliot) should have been known by the main female English major writer/character and should have given her at least a shred of an idea as to what to do with her talent, before becoming a slave to her inept husband. The silken and bloodless film, paced deliberately like a foreign film but lavished with a sensitive score to supply emotion and nuance that apparently could not be found among the writing, dies an early death. The cliches, the set-up, the secondary characters, the endless flashbacks, all slow down what culminates in a dimestore firework display of "f" words that substitues for genuine drama. Why Jonathan Pryce was not nominated for an acting award is curious? Why his character is specifically Jewish fails to bring any resonance to the story? One wonders if that detail is an anti-semitic sentiment or just a leftover detail that offers no further insight to this car crash of a film.