The Roses review: No one expects marriage to be a bed of roses. We can only hope it doesn’t end up as the bed of the Roses – oh yes, that famous couple played to savage perfection, in a marriage made in heaven and lived in hell, by Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, in the 1989 version of a Warren Adler novel.
This version drops the ‘war’ part from the title, and with it, pretty much all of the ferocity that made The War of the Roses one of its kind. Turner and Douglas had done two very successful romantic comedies going into the 1989 film, and when the Roses end up crumpled on the floor of their dream home, which they have crashed into ruin, their hatred is as satisfying as their love once was.
Transplant the story to today, and actors Colman and Cumberbatch, and we have two adorable British treasures which this very American story must lead to mutual destruction, but doesn’t have the heart to destroy.
One can’t really blame director Jay Roach (Trumbo, Bombshell) for stopping short, as it is not every day that one can get Colman and Cumberbatch together, and as main leads in a Hollywood film. However, screenwriter Tony McNamara, who did wit and satire so well in The Favourite (also starring Colman) and Poor Things, should have known better.
The mix of the two is a film that has us always, always looking forward to Colman’s Ivy and Cumberbatch’s Theo, and chuckling at their very English repartee, but leaving us exasperated about the rest of it.
Colman and Cumberbatch don’t really set the screen on fire – though The Roses would have you believe otherwise – and, when the romantic embers give way to marriage fireworks, you don’t really feel those sparks of tension.
Ivy is a gifted chef, Theo a lauded architect; her career takes off just when his takes a dive; he ends up becoming the house husband looking after the children; she the jet-setter who is now always busy. There are enough ignition points there – even accounting for the change in gender dynamics and a growing role for women outside the house, since the 1980s when Adler’s novel and the previous film came out.
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But in The Roses, just when it seems the delicately poised marriage has reached a tipping point – with Ivy aware of her growing resentment at having to mollycoddle an equally aware Theo’s bruised ego – the film pulls back.
Even the situation with the children is a cop-out, with the two conveniently sent away to some kind of a school for super-athletes. In the 1989 film, the children were older and in college. It means there is no collateral damage to worry about when the Roses, first in a very British way, and then in a lot un-British way, start throwing insults and accusations at each other.
The supporting cast is also a mismatch, with McKinnon and Samberg wasted, among others. Her Amy, with the undisguised hots for Theo, seems supplanted from another film, operating on a vibe entirely her own.
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By the time dangerous things such as bullets actually start whizzing around, it is too little left for too late. In one of their brutally honest moments, Theo admits to feeling “sporadic dizzying waves of hatred” towards Ivy. The problem with The Roses is not that Theo feels this way, or that Ivy does so too. Any married person would empathise with that.
The problem with The Roses is that we feel barely a thorn.
The Roses movie cast: Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kate McKinnon, Andy Samberg, Alison Janney
The Roses movie director: Jay Roach
The Roses movie rating: 2 stars
