The wife of the title is named Joan Castleman (Glenn Close) who has been married to acclaimed author Joe Castleman (Jonathan Price) for decades now. The two share a strained marriage fraught with difficulties but it looks like there might be a chance for at least a fun getaway once Joe learns he's receiving a Noble Prize in Literature. It's an extraordinary achievement and the two of them, along with their son David (Max Irons), head off to Stockholm to watch Joe receive this distinguished prize. While there, the family keeps running into Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), an author who desperately wants to pen a biography of Joe Castleman. While doing research for the project, he reveals to Joan that he knows the couple's secret; Joan is actually the one has been writing all of Joe's books over the years.
Yes, the person who is seemingly just the quiet spouse of a world-famous author is actually the human being responsible for some of the most acclaimed novels of all-time. This, along with the idea of what women were capable of in the literary world, when Joan was starting out as a writer, is what informs the strained relationship between the Castleman's and that's all some potentially fascinating material for a motion picture that The Wife never quite manages to realize to its fullest potential. The frequently too muted for its own good manner in which the movie confronts these pivotal elements of its story isn't so much bad as it is disappointingly average.
A key reason why The Wife never becomes as dramatically compelling as it could be is due to the decision to interweave recurring flashbacks sequences into the story showing Joan and Joe meeting for the first time, falling in love and trying to break into the writer biz. Such flashbacks are likely intended as a way to explore Joan's desires and personality while maintaining her close-to-the-chest nature in the 1993 sections of the feature, but these flashbacks are frequently awkwardly placed into the film and, aside from one well-done moment that adds a tragic undercurrent to how Joe chose to celebrate learning about his Noble Prize victory, don't reveal all that much new about the characters in their 1993 predicaments. Just as one begins to really get invested in Joan's plight in the sequences set late into the 20th century, suddenly we're off to another flashback that doesn't shed as much light on the characters as they should.
These sequences set in 1993 aren't devoid of problems themselves though as director Bjorn Runge struggles to channel his inner Richard Linklater and find interesting ways to film the dialogue-heavy interactions between the members of the Castleman family. However, it is in these parts of The Wife that the movie finds the most success mostly due to the performances, Glenn Close especially does an excellent job portraying Joan as someone who can blend into a crowd almost without even thinking at this point but is still a person capable of shaking the heavens themselves when they speak their mind (my word is Close ever powerful in a climactic scene where she finally gets to speak her character's mind).
It's also fun to see Johnathan Pryce go directly against the conventional kindly & considerate characters he usually plays in his portrayal of Joe Castleman, a total conceited heel, and it's a part he handles quite well at that! Screenwriter Jane Anderson may struggle with juggling how The Wife darts between the past and 1993, but she finds more success in penning some entertaining dialogue for Close and Pryce to exchange that's brimming with unspoken animosity that's been building up for decades. The best parts of these bits of small-scale conversation are good enough to make me wish that the alright but underwhelming The Wife had decided to shrink down its scope and just focused more on its best elements, like the two lead performances, particularly a terrific turn from Glenn Close.
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