The Wife (2017)

Directed by: Björn Runge | 100 minutes | drama | Actors: Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Max Irons, Christian Slater, Elizabeth McGovern, Harry Lloyd, Annie Starke, Morgane Polanski, Alix Wilton Regan, Karin Franz Körlof, Nick Fletcher

Veteran Glenn Close (“Fatal Attraction”) and Jonathan Pryce (“Game of Thrones”) attempt to copy the art-of-aging movie “45 Years” in the unsubtly titled “The Wife” . There’s a secret, which is revealed to the viewer just before a major event in the sedate movie wedding, in this case the long-awaited award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Pryce’s character.

Writer Joe Castleman (what makes him so good remains unclear) is a self-righteous figure, heavily dependent on his plucky wife, played by Close. The latter will play an important role in the settlement of this otherwise predictable melodrama, with a Rijk de Gooijer and the Golden Calf moment as the endings, and a bird’s-eye resuscitation attempt with moody classical music in the background.

You read it, this cinematic meal needs a good crank of the pepper mill to get flavor. Castleman is a bully to his accompanying adult son David (Max Irons), who is also a writer; as does wife Joan, with Castleman the only character fleshed out. The family is stalked in snowy Stockholm by a young photographer (Körlof) with a showy crush on the Nobel Prize winner, and a self-proclaimed biographer of Castleman (Slater), who gets Joan and David drunk to turn them against Joe.

We would have liked to have seen more of the causes, but the promising flashbacks of Joe and Joan as newlyweds jump from scratch. Although Close and Pryce do their best, they can’t do much with the scant tale full of family grievances, all of which are exposed by winning the prize. You can count on your fingers that everything around the ceremony explodes, and well. It is misery, mixed with emotional eruptions and strings, ending with an airplane disappearing on the horizon.