‘The Roses’ Movie Review: Cumberbatch And Colman Are Prickly Pears In Bitterly Funny Remake
Photo from Searchlight Pictures
From Jeremy Kibler
As Frank Sinatra once crooned, “love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage,” but what if you sometimes want to run over your spouse with a horse and carriage? If that sounds too dark, Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses was already adapted once by Danny DeVito in 1989, and it was one of the bleakest (and most visually stylish) comedies about the highs and lows of marriage. So savage and increasingly absurd in how far it took Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas’ marital combat, to the point of testing all character sympathy, there was still a ring of stinging truth.
With this context, the decision to remake The War of the Roses and remake it this way with two inherently witty Brits as our leads was a smart choice. With The Roses, director Jay Roach (he of all three Austin Powers movies, Meet the Parents, and Meet the Fockers) takes the same material and brings a more crowd-pleasing sensibility, however, this is not some toothless do-over. Roach works from a brutally relatable, wicked zinger-filled script by Tony McNamara (who wrote both Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite and Poor Things), and for the most part, these disparate sensibilities click. This is an update that still keeps things bitter, irrationally farcical, and dark.
A never-funnier Benedict Cumberbatch and a sharp-as-a-tack Olivia Colman are both dialed in to portray the entire spectrum of a love-to-hate relationship as Theo and Ivy Rose. He’s an architect who has just built his life’s work, and she’s a chef ready to open her own restaurant. Ten years of marriage and two kids later, the couple is thriving, until a historic California storm changes everything for their respective careers. The museum building Theo designed is destroyed, sending his career on the decline, while numerous walk-ins and one rave review from an acclaimed food critic during the storm make Ivy’s seafood restaurant a success. By this change, Theo is out of work and ends up becoming the stay-at-home dad who folds the laundry, while Ivy becomes the breadwinner. Their different parenting styles starts to become a sticking point—Dad gets his kids into an exercise regiment like him, and Mom feeds them sugar—and just one of several resentments that sends the Roses’ love spiraling into hatred.
The Roses is sharp, thorny, spiky, and any other rose-themed adjective you can think of, but a sense of humanity is actually never lost. When we first meet the Roses, they’re sitting next to each other on a couch in their marriage counselor’s office. The assignment is to list ten things they love about each other, but Theo says, “I would rather live with her than a wolf,” and Ivy says, “He has arms.” These hilarious barbs go to show that therapy probably can’t help them, but Theo and Ivy still know how to have a laugh together, even when it’s at their own marriage.
Of course, this is Cumberbatch and Colman’s show all the way (along with some stunning architectural porn). When it’s just these two prickly pears, the film is like a delicate, finely tuned dance, every passive-aggressive statement ringing true and coming from a place we understand. Matching each other every step of the way as Theo and Ivy’s personal and professional resentments bubble to the surface, Cumberbatch and Colman can both be caustically funny and rawly vulnerable, sometimes in the same scene. With an escalating dark farce, there’s always the temptation to turn the characters more into caricatures; though Theo and Ivy surely let their emotions get heightened and behave badly, the actors always make sure they feel like real people.
Unfortunately, the supporting players seem to be acting in a much broader movie. Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, who usually can’t help but show up and be funny with a single line or facial expression, are so one-note in their shtick as Theo’s friend Barry and his wife Amy, who constantly throws herself at Theo. Otherwise, Zoë Chao (as Theo’s colleague) does get one blisteringly mean bit when taking a swing at Ivy and Theo’s “banter” with her pretentious husband (Jamie Demetriou) at dinner, and Allison Janney comes in to steamroll everybody in exactly one scene as Ivy’s tough-as-nails divorce attorney.
If a remake is really working on its own, one rarely if ever stops and thinks about the original source. Luckily, that is the case with The Roses. There’s less of an extreme, anything-goes danger here, albeit with a nod to a falling chandelier and Chekhov’s Gun being established early on at a gun range with Theo’s couple friends, but Tony McNamara’s script still doesn’t pull any punches. The ugliness comes out in smaller, more personal ways rather something as larger-than-life as a monster truck jumping; this time, a spouse uses their other half’s raspberry allergy to their advantage when forcing them to sign divorce papers.
Belying its delightful animated title sequence with a cover of The Turtles’ “Happy Together,” The Roses is just as willing as the previous adaptation of Adler’s story to go to dark, acrimonious places. It doesn’t even cop out with the ending, which is perfectly timed and impish yet just plain sad. This is the kind of movie that will either save a marriage as a conversation-starter or end it as a pot-stirrer.
Rating: 3.5/5
The Roses is currently in theaters.
