I have a policy of not seeing movies based on books I love, which are often focus characters’ internal lives or take a non-traditional narrative approach, if not both. So I’ve never seen the movies based on The Color Purple or Cloud Atlas,and I’m planning to not see the upcoming Bel Canto.
It turns out, though, that I may need to be more careful about picking movies based on books I haven’t read.
The Wife, directed by Björn Runge, is based on a novel by Meg Wolitzer. It presents the story of Joan Castleman (Glenn Close), the wife of famous novelist Joe (Jonathan Pryce), as they travel to Oslo to accept Joe’s Nobel Prize. Although I always try to avoid spoilers before seeing a movie [which, by the way, will be rife in this essay, for both the movie and the book], I’d guessed the big twist. The very poster’s tagline is “Secrets Lie Between the Lines,” and, c’mon, what could that be but that Joan had written Joe’s books?
So if the big surprise twist isn’t particularly surprising, the questions of interest are how did that happen? And what was it like for her? And those are the questions that the movie doesn’t really dig into.
Well, How Did I Get Here?
The movie moves back and forth in time (as does the book). In the “present,” (actually probably the ’90s, doing the math) the couple travels to Oslo for the prize ceremony, accompanied by their troubled son, David (Max Irons), and tailed by inquisitive biographer Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater). The sources of the tensions in these scenes are hinted at, but not really explained, by the flashbacks.
These start at Smith in the 1950s, where Joan takes a creative writing class from the married Joe. Despite her talent, she’s discouraged from pursuing a writing career by visiting writer Elaine Mozell (Elizabeth McGovern). She and Joe begin an affair, Joe gets fired and Joan drops out, and they move to Greenwich Village. Joe tries to write a novel and Joan works for a publisher, where she encounters further contempt for women writers.
The movie covers many of the plot points from the book in this early period, but skips more briskly over the next 40 or so years of their married life, which Wolitzer presents in more detail. Any film adaptation has to leave out plenty of material from the book – it’s the nature of the process of adapting a novel into a film. That’s fine. Choices are made. Not all of the choices in this case, however, serve the story well.
Miss You
I have no quibbles with some of the filmmaker shorthand, where plot points are condensed and combined to tell the story briskly and visually. In the book, Joe twice inscribes a walnut as a romantic gesture to a woman he’s wooing, his first wife and then Joan. (The title of one Castleman novel is The Walnut; we see Joan rereading in Oslo it as she broods about her failing marriage.)
In the film, the gesture is given a third beat as part of Joe’s rather pathetic attempted seduction of a young handler in Oslo. In the book, this doesn’t happen: He’d stopped using that ploy – and, in fact, stopped his reflexive womanizing – by that point. No big deal: In the movie, screenwriter Jane Anderson uses that third beat to efficiently present both Joe’s lack of faithfulness and his lack of imagination.
In addition to conflating some episodes from the book, Anderson omits others. One major theme that she completely abandons is Joe’s relationships with other writers, most of whom appear in scenes of social occasions with their wives, providing context for the Castlemans’ literary marriage and illuminating the gendered nature of the writing life of the time. (Wolitzer also uses these scenes to take a few jabs at Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, without mentioning either by name.)
Anderson also leaves out one particular episode, a ’70s trip to Vietnam with a group of writers, many of them accompanied by their spouses – more literary marriages. On that trip, she observes a female writer who brought along her husband. Joan muses:
I didn’t want to be a “lady writer,” a word-painter in watercolors, or on the other hand a crazy woman, a ball-breaker, a handful. I didn’t want to be Elaine Mozell, the one who had warned me a long time ago. She’d been loud and lonely, and she’d faded from view.
I had no idea who could love a show-off woman writer. What sort of man would stay with her and not be threatened by her excesses, her rage, her spirit, her skill? Who was he, this phantom, unthreatened husband who was still attractive and strong himself? Maybe he lived under a rock somewhere, sliding out once in a while to celebrate the big ideas of his brilliant wife, before returning to the shadows. [page 132]
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
I’m disappointed by, but understand, Anderson’s decision to omit these opportunities to illuminate the Castlemans’ marriage by contrasting it to those of their peers. Other changes, however, reflect a flattening and homogenization of the underlying dynamics of that relationship – a Hollywoodization that’s especially disappointing in an indie film directed by a Swede, Björn Runge, and produced mostly by Europeans.
One minor example: in the movie, the prize Joe wins is the Nobel. In the movie, he wins the (fictional) Helsinki Prize, a clear step (or two?) down in prestige. I love the resonance of that detail in the book – that this grand culmination of the writer’s career (whoever that writer might be) is not the Nobel.
The other example is utterly crucial, involving a character detail that explains much in the book, and the absence of which render the movie incomprehensible: Joe is Jewish. In fact, he’s a short, schlubby fellow a world away from the tall, distinguished Jonathan Pryce, CBE. (I’d’ve loved to have seen a version of this with Richard Dreyfuss playing Joe.)
Joe’s Jewishness provided the appeal of the exotic to the tall, blonde, WASPy Joan, and her Park Avenue parents’ objection to the relationship served to cement her devotion to him.
In fact, there’s a scene in the book that, in a few paragraphs, explains everything left unexplained in the movie. Soon after Joan dropped out of Smith and moved to Greenwich Village with Joe, she visits her parents. Leaving their apartment, she thinks:
But for now, before his success, Joe was still the Jewish rapist, and I was still the girl who improbably loved him. … [I]f I was truly going to be on my own with Joe, then what I’d said to my mother simply had to come true. Joe needed to be talented; he needed to be brilliant. It would cancel out his Jewishness, the unsavory scraps of his adultery, the crappy room he’d rented for us, and all the other flaws and disappointments that surrounded him. …
Iotas were dancing inside me, along with other things: my mother’s words, so vulgar and crabbed; my grandiose dreams of greatness for Joe. He would be a writer; the hopes I had for him were like the hopes men had for themselves: to conquer, to crust and astound. I didn’t particularly want to do any of that myself; it didn’t even occur to me that I could. … I didn’t want to play in the same field as the men; it would never be comfortable, and I couldn’t compete. My world wasn’t big enough, wide enough, dramatic enough, and my subjects were few. I knew my limits. [pages 109-110]
Time It Was
The Wife is a period piece, describing a marriage with its roots in the 1950s, a time when a talented woman writer wouldn’t see any role models for a career as a literary novelist. The postwar period was a total sausagefest in American literature, and women were in the suburbs raising families, not pursuing careers, literary or otherwise. (By the way, Friedan based The Feminine Mystique [1963] in part on her interviews with her fellow Smith alumnae.)
At such a time, a smart woman might have chosen to let her husband present her work as his own. Thank goodness that choice is so utterly mysterious to a modern audience, but the movie fails that audience by glossing over that time, and the choices Joan made, both originally in the ’50s and then repeatedly over the ensuing decades.
Whoever made the overall narrative choices in the movie – screenwriter Anderson, director Runge, or the quartet of European producers – the result is disappointingly incomplete. They left out the overall socio-historic context, and they left out the extremely salient detail of Joe’s religion, and her family’s reaction to it, so they miss the opportunity to delve into Joan’s character, leaving her as an unreadable blank.
Judy Weightman 