One thing that doing this blog has afforded me is the ability to evaluate many of these movies in hindsight, in particular the ones that have become classics and which ones have not. Seeing Big again, for example, and Working Girl, I can now understand their endurance and popular appeal. Once in a great while I’ll see a mediocre or flat-out lame selection and wonder, What the hell did people see in that?
And then I’ll see a film, one that I liked at the time and then later couldn’t understand why it hasn’t become a classic, and then realize the reason. Such a film is The War of the Roses, Danny Devito’s second film as director, and third to co-star Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. It’s a black comedy about a marriage gone wrong, terribly wrong, and it sure has its moments of macabre humor and outlandish situations. But the curious thing about it is just how off-putting the whole thing is, as if it’s missing a key element to its wickedness. Sure it’s a black comedy, but it’s certainly not a fun black comedy, the way black comedies ought to be. And that, I think, is what keeps it from its would-be classic status.
Gavin D’Amato (Danny DeVito), a divorce lawyer, tells the story of the Rose couple, Oliver and Barbara, to a prospective client. Oh, things starts off just peachy: they meet-cute at a pastoral locale in Nantucket, have a delightful courtship, marry move into an apartment and have a couple of kids. Oliver is an up-and-coming attorney and a well-respected practice, but he’s a control freak, and doesn’t exactly appreciate his wife’s free-spirited nature, or entrepreneurial inclinations. But no matter; they both have their eyes on a beautiful mansion, and, despite their shaky financial situation, they buy it, moving in right away.
And that’s when the sh*t hits the fan. The kids are now grown up and move out, so the Rose are left alone, with no one to impress or model good behavior. Barbara feels the love has gone out of the marriage; Oliver can’t figure out why. Things get ugly real fast – he starts to destroy her possessions, she his, he accidentally runs over her cat, he destroys his vintage automobile in retaliation. Soon it gets so bad that cohabitation is out of the question, but since they both love the house, clearly more than each other, they find themselves at an impasse. Oliver has the solution; he realizes that according to law, they can legally stay in the same house (they have joint ownership), and so the abode becomes a war zone. When Barbara uses Oliver’s near-death love note, giving up “everything to her,” against him, it becomes the last straw. After verbal and physical fisticuffs, they both wind up dangling from a three-story-high chandelier, crashing down to their death after its cord gives way. Gavin’s client is convinced to go home and settle with his wife amicably.
The War of the Roses is, of course, part of that film subgenre about the unstoppable force and the immovable object – in other words, two bullheaded people, or more, who face off against each other, only to all lose in the end. Several films come to mind – Neighbors, A Simple Plan, Very Bad Things. A few of these films have the characters ultimately coming to their senses and resolving said conflict, but most of them do not, leaving us with the obvious moral that we need to settle our disputes amicably, lest face the inevitable consequences. It’s a risky move – the filmmaker is essentially asking us to spend two hours with essentially unlikeable people, promising that the message at the end will make it all worth it. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.
But The War of the Roses goes beyond this one step – it’s also a love story, and then a love-gone-wrong-story, and that complicates things. Because now we’re invested in a ostensibly happy relationship, only to have the rug pulled out from under us, or I should say, yanked out ruthlessly and thrown at us. That’s another element that makes Roses even riskier, and I don’t think it pays off. We like Douglas and Turner together, and we feel a bit betrayed, particularly when the shenanigans go too far for comfort.
Yes, I know there are successful examples of marital discord – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and its model, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, to name a couple. But in both of those we get character backstory, and a reason for the troubles. And therein lies the problem with Roses: we don’t really know why they split up – just a cursory scene in which Barbara is “dissatisfied.” For that matter, we don’t really know why they fall in love either. Of the two, perhaps Oliver’s begavior is more discernable; he, apparently, does have some feelings for her (in their last breaths, he attempts to touch her, and she brushes him off), so then why is he such a brute to her? Maybe these questions could be better explored in a drama, and indeed many parts of the film are pretty near a drama anyway. But the bottom line is this: by the time we get to the scene where Barbara feeds Oliver’s own dog to him as a pate (not really), we’re amused by the extent to which they despise each other but still have no emotional investment in the characters.
But Devito has a good eye for camera placement (he loves the diopter shot), and his score doesn’t overwhelm the action, as it so often does with dark comedies (e.g. Desperate Housewives). It s certainly a well-made film, and I did appreciate the ending, in which Gavin dissuades a potential client who evidently got the message (his walking out of the office as a window reflection is pitch perfect). But it’s just one of those movies that I wished I liked more, as I love all the talent involved, and love a black comedy as much as the next guy.
But it’s not one of those movies you see all the time on TBS or Channel Z late at night. And it probably shouldn’t be.
Still, watchable enough to get….
Rating: ***
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