‘The Roses’ Has Barbs But No Thorns

Since it would basically be entertaining to watch Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman read the Facebook Community Guidelines, it’s hardly surprising that they are a delight in The Roses, the newest adaptation of Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses.

They get a decent script from Tony McNamara (Poor Things and more), safe direction by Jay Roach (the Austin Powers film series, Meet the Parents series, Dinner for Schmucks), and some erratic, if vaguely entertaining, occasional side kicks in Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon. Though the film is nominally set in Mendocino, California, it was filmed in Salcombe, Devon (in the UK) and, without being parochial about it, everything English in the film is great, everything American in it is mediocre. (As an Australian, McNamara is half great, half mediocre).

The Roses ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Jay Roach
Written by: Tony McNamara
Starring: Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kate McKinnon, Andy Samberg, Ncuti Gatwa, Sunita Mani, Zoë Chao
Running time: 105 mins

Cumberbatch and Colman portray the twinkle-eyed, foul-mouthed, highly eloquent Theo and Ivy Rose Theo. As young professionals they move to America together to find freedom of expression, only for Ivy to get forced “by the patriarchy” to become a stay-at-home mother to their two children. Theo is a gifted architect until his star building and career are crushed by a climate-change storm. At the same time, from being an over-gifted home chef, Ivy’s career rises like a soufflé on steroids. The two parents reverse roles — and their life unravels.

The film milks their Englishness — their disgust at guns, their mutual delight at the marriage therapist who doesn’t get them in the slightest, the way in which their subtle but deep caustic digs are too complex for their friends to mimic at a dinner with schmucks that the Roses host. Though Samberg as Barry and McKinnon as his wife Amy have lines and scenes, they don’t really have much to sink their teeth into. That, however, is more than the film gives to poor Sunita Mani (Jane) and Ncuti Gatwa (Jeffrey). They play the part of kitchen help and, effectively, provide little more than that in the cast.

The plot is serviceable though the plot features are comically over-signposted: scary guns, a deathly allergy, an antique stove (though surely there is Spanish Inquisition knife footage on the cutting room floor).  The script, though, is mostly fascinating and funny when it explores the lightning fast repartee and connection between Ivy and Theo in their good times and how that same rattling connection sours and becomes a conduit for spite in their bad times. Theo goes to the bath with his headphones on and misses Ivy’s heartfelt apology. Ivy is so forbidding to Theo that he simply doesn’t tell her when he saves a whale.

Both films are black comedies but, in a move away from the maniacally destructive 1989 Wars of the Roses with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner (directed by Danny DeVito), The Roses is more interested in the constancy of the love rather than the drive to destruction in its breakdown. Unfortunately that requires a more compelling backdrop than Roach and McNamara are prepared to provide.