“Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love: husbands and wives who can’t communicate, children who can’t communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on — and in real life, I might add — spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can’t communicate. I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up!” –Tom Lehrer (RIP)
Yes, your humble movie blogger lucked into a free preview screening (complete with a thoughtful souvenir gift bag). Don’t expect this to be a regular thing, nobody knew or cared who I was. And I prefer that to being mistaken for a professional movie critic. Or worse, an “influencer.” (Gods above, just typing that makes me want to puke.)
The Roses is the latest adaptation of a 1981 novel, which was previously and loosely adapted by Danny DeVito in 1989. In both previous iterations, it was called “The War of the Roses.” I frankly prefer the older title.
Anyway, this latest go-round brings us an all-star cast including Allison Janney, Ncuti Gatwa, Kate McKinnon, Andy Samberg, and more, all anchored by executive producers Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman. And they’re under the direction of Jay Roach, a criminally underrated director who’s proven equally adept at comedy (the respective franchises of Austin Powers and Meet the Parents) and political drama (see: Trumbo and Bombshell). Last but not least, the script comes from Tony McNamara, best known for his collaborations with Emma Stone (namely The Favourite, Cruella, and Poor Things).
Yeah, this one had me intrigued. Good premise, good cast, good talent behind the camera. And the end result is indeed a perfectly solid film, but still nowhere near as enjoyable as what we were sold.
This is the story of Theo and Ivy Rose, respectively played by Cumberbatch and Colman. Theo is an architect, Ivy is a chef, and the two of them meet-cute over how their respective artistic geniuses are getting stifled in their native London. In the course of a whirlwind romance, the both of them move clear across the planet to seek greener pastures in Mendocino, California. (The whole movie was shot in the UK, by the way.)
Cut to a few years later, when the both of them are married and raising two kids (Roy is played at varying ages by Wells Rappaport and Ollie Robinson, Hattie is played by Hala Finley and Delaney Quinn). Ivy has just opened up her own seafood restaurant, cheekily calling it “We’ve Got Crabs!” The restaurant isn’t getting much business, but she’s perfectly happy with that because it allows for more time with her family. Meanwhile, Theo just landed a fantastic gig designing a new beautiful seaside museum.
Through a wildly improbable series of events I don’t dare recount here, Ivy becomes an international superstar chef at the exact same time Theo becomes an internet laughingstock and gets blacklisted from every architectural firm on the planet. Which means that now Ivy is running herself ragged and flying all over the globe in the process of building and maintaining her nascent restaurant empire while Theo stays at home and raises the kids. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. It quickly turns out to be the beginning of a long, painful, ugly separation.
To address this right up front, the film was heavily marketed as a no-holds-barred grudge match between our two leads. Here’s the problem: Pretty much everything seen in the trailers is in the last thirty minutes. The point of no return doesn’t come until an hour in. Allison Janney — in the role of Ivy’s divorce lawyer –has her spot above the title and she’s only in one scene.
Sure, it’s fun to watch Colman and Cumberbatch try and one-up each other in terms of cruel pranks and lethal force as they work to physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually destroy each other. But that’s just the climax. That’s not really what the movie is about.
So, what’s the movie really about? The short answer is that it’s about watching Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman verbally spar with each other for 100 solid minutes. The long answer is more complicated.
First of all, the red flags were there off the jump. Theo and Ivy bond over a shared egocentric belief that they’re being held back by small-minded idiots, and they fall so madly in lust with each other that they’re having sex in the fridge of Ivy’s workplace within two minutes of meeting each other. I might add that all throughout the picture, they resolve all their conflicts with sex and they cope with all their hard emotions by way of heavy drinking. Granted, they do try marriage counseling at one point, and the trailers have already spoiled how well that goes.
All of that aside, what really drives a wedge between Theo and Ivy is of course their respective career trajectories. And no, it’s nothing so simple as fragile chauvinistic ego demanding that Theo should be the breadwinner or whatever. It’s more to do with all-consuming envy about the fact that Ivy gets to thrive and excel at what she’s passionate about, while Theo will likely never get another chance at doing what he was always meant to do. Until he finally does get that chance.
Late in the second act (again, this point has been explicitly spoiled by the trailers), Theo gets the chance to design and build a new house for his family. This house is the only major sticking point in the eventual divorce. Theo wants the house because it’s his last best shot at revitalizing his career. He put his passion, his expertise, all of his mind and soul into that house in a way that he never got the chance to at any other point in pretty much the whole movie. And Ivy wants the house just to spite Theo, and to prove the point that he put more effort into the house than he ever did into their marriage. Also, because it was Ivy’s money that bought the house.
But what about the kids, you may be asking? Yeah, let’s get to the kids…
Another major red flag that’s always been there from the open is that Theo and Ivy have diametrically opposite philosophies with regard to parenting. Ivy the chef is all about spoiling her kids with specially made foods and sweets, encouraging them to play and have fun. Theo the architect is all about “building” bodies by way of nutrition and exercise. And remember, it’s Theo who spends all day every day with the kids while Ivy is out being a world-famous chef. What’s worse, it’s Theo who’s marinating in career failure, marital frustrations, and a general sense of inferiority, and he’s taking all of that out on his kids.
The upshot is that Hattie and Roy are brought up with military diligence, to the point where they’re college-level athletes before they’ve started high school. Is that any kind of healthy or beneficial way to raise a kid? Reasonable minds can disagree, and these two parents in particular vehemently disagree. More importantly, it was Theo who got to raise the children in his image because Ivy was never there. So of course Ivy’s kids turned into something she barely even recognizes as children.
It’s a cruel irony that Ivy got to live out Theo’s dreams and surpass him in every way, except the one and only way that ever really mattered to her.
Incidentally, you may be wondering what role the kids have to play in the third act. How do they respond to the divorce? What do they have to say and do while their parents are literally torturing and humiliating each other? No way in hell am I spoiling that here.
As a character piece, it works perfectly well. Cumberbatch and Colman are both world-class actors, and they’re both given so much time and dialogue to develop characters who are nuanced and layered and compelling to watch. Our two lead characters are so much more than mere punchlines. Trouble is, they’re the only ones who are.
Ncuti Gatwa and Sunita Mani play Ivy’s employees at the restaurants. Alas, the both of them are pretty much only there to mug for the camera and act as sounding boards for Ivy. Zoe Chao and Jamie Demetriou contribute practically nothing. Allison Janney steals her scene, but it’s still only one scene.
And then we’ve got Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon. Where do I even begin with these two?
They play Barry and Amy, a married couple who are friends with Theo and Ivy. In those brief and fleeting — albeit frequent — moments when we see Barry and Amy, it’s frustratingly unclear what their deal is and how strong their marriage really is. They clearly have an eccentric relationship, with boundaries that could perhaps best be defined as “fluid”. And yet, right up until the end, Barry and Amy both insist that their marriage is rock-solid and they’re life partners in all things.
Barry and Amy could’ve been a thematic contrast to Theo and Ivy. In theory, this was the healthy lasting marriage that could survive various ups and downs and changing times. In practice, that’s not what we get. Instead, we don’t really get characters so much as we get Samberg and McKinnon going through another iteration of their established comedic stylings. Samberg clowns it up as a clueless irreverent schlub while McKinnon chews the scenery as a hypersexual crazy-eyed eccentric.
The Roses fails to make effective use of its stacked supporting cast, instead putting full emphasis on the two leads. The filmmakers skimp on thematic development, instead going full-tilt into comedy. Presumably, the filmmakers had hoped that by showing Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman tearing into each other through the whole runtime — most especially during that climax — the end result would turn out to be some moving and heartfelt examination about the nature of love and marriage as a matter of course. Alas, that’s not what we get.
The filmmakers bet everything on comedy, and we got a funny movie. But will it have staying power as some poignant and insightful statement on relationships and divorce in the modern age? I don’t think so. This cast and crew could’ve easily made such a film, but that’s not the direction they went in. Maybe if they had gone for two hours and spent another ten or twenty minutes developing the Barry/Amy marriage as a strong thematic foil, but that’s not what happened.
A home video recommendation feels right for this one.