The Roses is a remake of The War of the Roses (1989), the diabolically funny black bitter comedy that was directed by Danny DeVito and starred Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas as a couple who start out in love, then hate each other like poison, and once their battle is under way it’s no holds barred. You remember the dinner-party scene and what he did to the fish course? You remember him sawing the heels off all her shoes and her serving him that liver pâté on crackers? (Let’s just say: no pets were spared.) Of course you remember. Will you remember this ‘reimagining’ in 36 years? It has an excellent director, an excellent scriptwriter, an excellent cast (Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman) but no, you probably won’t.
The film is directed by Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents, Bombshell) from a script by Tony McNamara (The Favourite, Poor Things, The Great) and stars Cumberbatch as Theo, an architect and Colman as Ivy, a chef. It has an in medias res opening that plunges us into their couples therapy where they’ve been asked to write a list of the things they still like about each other. She doesn’t stick to the brief. Her list finishes with: ‘Theo, what a cunt!’ (You may have seen this in the trailer. You can see entire films via trailers these days.) Much to the therapist’s horror they both burst into laughter. This tells us that they still get each other and may, at any moment, reconcile. We are asked to root for them. Mostly, I just wanted to bang their heads together.
We next flashback to their initial meet-cute in a restaurant where, to escape a dinner with boring colleagues, he tries to escape through the kitchen. Here, he encounters Ivy, a lowly chef slicing salmon. It’s a coup de foudre. They immediately have sex in the walk-in freezer which must break quite a few hygiene laws but I’m not an expert on food safety. Next thing we know they’ve decamped from the UK to California, are married with two kids, yet while her career rockets his fails catastrophically. (Quite how she builds a restaurant empire from a single seaside eaterie called… wait for it… We Have Crabs is anyone’s guess.)
She’s flying on private jets and drinking champagne while he’s at home either combing out the kids’ nits or funnelling his ego through subjecting them to a programme of military fitness. He resents her success. To help fill the void she bankrolls his construction of a dream family home overlooking the ocean. He goes way over budget while she feels her role as a mother has been trashed. Tensions come to the boil in that house, the one neither will cede in any divorce.
There’s a dinner party from hell. There’s a gun. Knives are thrown. He destroys her beloved oven, the one that once belonged to Julia Child. They do their utmost to hurt each other. This escalating nastiness made sense in the original as Douglas’s character could not let his wife go. She was his possession. She belonged to him. She must not leave him. This was never communicated yet we understood it.
But here? Both are excellent communicators whose relationship seems to have been almost entirely based on witty repartee. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t just sit down and talk it through. It may be that the script is too clever for its own good. It gives them the tools (chiefly, articulacy) to help them out of their stand-off, which they do not then deploy.
There’s some fun in watching Colman and Cumberbatch go head-to-head and there are some decent lines. (‘Shall we have one of those circular arguments that go nowhere?’) But it’s not a relationship you can believe in and it fails to outshine the original. As for the ending, no chandelier? Really?
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