The decision to call the new adaptation of the Warren Adler novel The War of the Roses simply The Roses is fitting. Where that novel, and its 1989 film adaptation starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, are about a divorce steeped in hatred, the new film, starring Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, is about a marriage that is loving underneath it all, even as it grows combative. And that change, while it perhaps makes the story more pleasing and human, saps it of its bite.
Here, Colman plays Ivy, a chef who meets Theo (Cumberbatch), an architect who wanders into the kitchen while she's working. They have instant chemistry, and before you know it, they have relocated to the coast of California and are married with young twins. He is working to design a new museum, and she opens a seafood restaurant that struggles to attract customers. A stormy night shifts their fortunes, and resentments start to grow.
Most of the run of the film is spent with them arguing and then making up, often tearfully, in a way that calls to mind lots of other stories about affluent middle-aged couples trying to endure boredom in their marriages. It turns darker only close to the end, and even then, it runs on an engine of these people basically loving each other but getting carried away by their hurt feelings. Other than a brief montage of spiteful behavior (most of it shown in the trailer), they have mostly ordinary arguments until the finale.
There's a tonal tentativeness to The Roses that is maybe not surprising, given that the promotional material refers to its being "from the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things." And it's true: Director Jay Roach is responsible for both Meet the Parents and the Austin Powers movies, while writer Tony McNamara wrote Poor Things and The Favourite. It's not that different sensibilities can't work together, but the problem with The Roses is that it doesn't seem to believe in the bitterness it introduces late; it plays like a wacky comedy with an obligation to gesture at darkness.
The supporting cast is made up of sturdy comedy contributors: Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon as an American couple with whom the Roses are rather inexplicably friends, Zoë Chao and Jamie Demetriou as another couple they know through Theo's work, and Allison Janney in a single scene as Ivy's divorce lawyer. But other than Janney, The Roses doesn't use these actors to its best advantage.
Samberg can do both high-energy and sad-sack comedy very well, but his character seems adrift, introduced in a scene involving his convenient obsession with (Chekhov's) guns, but otherwise inessential. McKinnon is weird and horny in the way she is often weird and horny, and she's so good at it, but the third or fourth time she plays basically the same scene in the same way, even this loses steam. Chao and Demetriou are funny but are asked to work incredibly broad, to the point where a scene that should be about simmering tension between Theo and Ivy is thrown off by their presence. Again, these are very talented performers who have been fantastic in other things, but Roach seems to understand broad comedy better than biting satire.
An important moment — very emotionally nihilistic, very go-for-broke moment — in the 1989 adaptation of The War of the Roses comes at the very end. (Caution: Here, you will be spoiled about something in that film that doesn't happen in this one.) Oliver and Barbara Rose lie gravely injured in the ruins of the house they destroyed each other to keep. Oliver reaches over to Barbara, placing his hand on her, perhaps offering one final moment of reconciliation before they both die. Barbara reaches up, touches his hand ... and then throws his hand away from her. Even close to death, she has the energy to reject him. It is brilliant and brutal, and not only does it not happen in this movie, but when you get to the end, you will know it could not happen in this movie, because nobody in this marriage could be that mean.
There's nothing wrong with a basically pro-marriage comedy about how hard it is not to grow bored and resentful in a long relationship, and how things can get out of hand if you don't take the time to appreciate each other and so forth. Colman and Cumberbatch are charming and funny, and from time to time one of them will uncork a really good line reading that's worth a laugh.
But the moral of the original story was that nobody will ever truly and deeply despise you quite like somebody who used to love you, and it's hard not to miss it. The way divorce turns the Roses vicious to their cores — vicious truly, vicious and meaning it — is not part of this telling. And as such, it raises the question that so many returns to existing intellectual property raise: Why? Why not just write a middle-aged married-people comedy as an original story, rather than tying it to an existing property whose essence it doesn't share? No adaptation will ever be a carbon copy of a novel, of course, let alone a copy of a previous effort on film. But it can be faithful to a satire's bite, particularly when that bite is the main appeal of the entire story.
The Roses isn't bad, exactly. Why not watch a couple of charming actors play off each other, having a little fun, throwing some barbs? It's fine. But the story of the Roses can be, and has been, a gloriously nasty, acidic little thing. And what you have here is a standard studio comedy, very affable and jokey, and that's a little disappointing.
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