Based on Meg Woltizer’s 2003 novel of the same name, The Wife follows Joan Castleman and her novelist husband Joe as they travel to Stockholm so that he can be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. A veritable power couple, Joan is to Joe the ultimate alpha wife and the cornerstone of their family – yet, as we flash back to their courtship when Joan was an impressionable and gifted young writing student and Joe her married English professor, it quickly becomes apparent that things between the pair (and Joe’s much lauded body of work) are not what they seem.
In the wake of last year’s Harvey Weinstein allegations and the #MeToo movement, conversations around the recognition and value of women’s labour are finally being had, and to these The Wife makes a thoughtful and engaging contribution. Played with subtle brilliance by Glenn Close (and, in flashback, by her real-life daughter Annie Starke), Joan’s plight will be a familiar one for women used to the everyday trade-offs of professional life – and by laying out the long-term consequences of one such compromise, The Wife offers a truly cutting critique of the men who exploit them.
As grim as this may sound, however, Joan is never portrayed as a victim – on the contrary, as she comes to terms with the extent to which she has been wronged, so too do Joan’s qualities of strength and resilience reveal themselves.
The Wife may be a rumination on the short-changing of women in their professional and personal lives, but a nuanced and cautiously optimistic one – positing, almost radically, that it is never too late for women to take control.
