The Roses is a new black comedy remake of “The War of the Roses”, in which two Britain’s finest actors, Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, star as a couple trapped in a self-destructive marriage.
Directed by Jay Roach and scripted by Tony McNamara, the film reimagines Warren Adler’s 1981 novel, already adapted in 1989 with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, for a contemporary audience. Colman and Cumberbatch undoubtedly command attention, but the finished product is sleek yet oddly empty.
Colman is Ivy, the high-flying celebrated chef, and Cumberbatch’s Theo is the failed architect whose greatest professional feat falls apart, reducing him to a resentful stay-at-home caregiver. The movie reverses the original’s dynamic, with Ivy funding the family while Theo descends into venomous feelings of inadequacy. What started as a passion-based marriage deteriorates into mutual contempt, acted out in venomous exchanges and drunken rages.
There are flashes of stinging dialogue, such as Theo’s nostalgic one: “When we were younger, I knew what she was going to say before she said it. Now I don’t know what she’s said after she’s said it.” But for all the movie’s verbal sparring, it cannot quite persuade audiences that these two people ever truly loved each other, and thus the fall into hatred is less effective. The remake adds a cringe-worthy subplot, with Theo fixating on training their children into sports programs so they can depart the house in their mid-teens. It is like a deus ex machina to make room for the definitive conflict, but it works against plausibility.
Supporting cast members such as Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, playing the couple’s friends, and Ncuti Gatwa as a sous chef in Ivy’s kitchen, contribute little more than color to the background, while Alison Janney offers a characteristically acidic performance as Ivy’s divorce attorney. Even with the starry cast, however, much of the comedy feels suppressed and the satire dulled.
Visually, The Roses is the glossy look of a Nancy Meyers film, with its upscale houses and high-gloss sheen. But this gloss serves against the material, blunting the darker corners of the film. Rather than embracing the rough, tragicomic disorder of the breakdown of marriage, it tends to feel like an ill-matched romcom which has lost its bearings.
Colman and Cumberbatch continue to be compelling actors, and the chemistry between them flares in glimpses, but The Roses never entirely invests in the bitterness that lies beneath. It’s a stylish and pedigreed movie, but one that ultimately holds back.
The Roses opens on August 28 in Australia and August 29 in the UK and US.
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