Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, the two most prestigious English screen actors in the world, resoundingly butt heads in this feel-bad movie; it is oddly, but not uninterestingly, composed throughout in feelgood romcom style. In casting terms, this is a Borg-McEnroe 10-set tie-break leading to play being suspended even as the leads bring every microlitre of their technique to the game.
They play Ivy and Theo, two high-achieving professionals whose marriage becomes a black-comic Chornobyl of toxic hate; it is adapted from the 1981 novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler, which was previously filmed in 1989 with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas. Tony McNamara writes this new version and the director is Jay Roach, known for Austin Powers and Meet the Parents. Colman and Cumberbatch are acting black-belts and they are never anything other than watchable, but as they shout and wince and snap and zing their way through the dialogue, it’s difficult to believe that they really love each other; and then later really hate each other. The film loses its nerve on this latter point.
The new version keeps a little more of the novel, in the sense that Ivy is supposed to be a brilliant chef, but it upends some of the original’s classic divorce talking points about a woman sacrificing her career for family and the husband’s professional status, and also therefore the traditional acrimony about who gets to keep the house. In this movie, Theo is an architect, not a lawyer, whose career collapses along with his most famous building and he becomes the househusband looking after the kids while Ivy becomes a globally celebrated foodie; she comes to despise her husband’s resentful beta-male loser identity and his ungrateful attitude when she bankrolls his designs for a new hi-tech family home.
Weirdly, this sophisticated English guy is supposed to be fanatically coaching the kids in athletic prowess so they leave home early, in their mid-teens, not for college, but for some cloudily imagined sports institution. The children need to be got out of the way so the grownups’ battle can kick off, of course, but this is a peculiar and unconvincing contrivance, maybe there to position the couple as younger than in the original. (Surely people like this would have their eyes on Ivy League glory?)
There are, of course, some nice lines. Theo says sadly: “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.” There is a lot of angry acting and a fair bit of drunk acting; at one stage, Theo gets plastered on a flight to New York, to Ivy’s aghast embarrassment, and then she gets drunk in New York, finally throwing up in the bath, to Theo’s icy resentment. The difference is between loser-drunk and winner-drunk, but it doesn’t exactly test the range of these brilliant actors. Their friends Barry and Amy are played in supporting roles by Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, great comic performers who don’t get much funny material. Ncuti Gatwa plays a sous chef in Ivy’s cafe and Alison Janney is her formidably aggressive divorce lawyer.
The movie has a high gloss and sheen, like something by Nancy Meyers, which creates a diverting disconnect, yet it flinches from the recognisable, tragicomic reality of a bad marriage.
• The Roses is out on 28 August in Australia and 29 August in the UK and US.
