‘The Roses’ Review: By Any Other Name it Would Still Stink [C-]
At the opening of Jay Roach’s new film The Roses, with Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, the married pair are in therapy, asked to read off a list of 10 things they love about each other. “He has arms,” says Ivy; “Her head is a nice shape,” chimes in Theo. But this turns very quickly into 10 things I hate about you (“He sounds like a diseased dog’s death rattle”) and the therapist wraps up the appointment ahead of schedule. So sets the tone of the film—one of cheery apathy.
Adapted from the 1981 novel The War of the Roses, which was turned into a film of the same name in 1989 and directed by Danny DeVito, we flashback to their restaurant meet cute in London. Ivy is a line cook with big ideas she’s not allowed to cultivate, Theo is an architect who wants to design eco-friendly buildings but his firm only wants cement block domiciles. He escapes a dinner meeting and hides out in the kitchen, where she feeds him salmon carpaccio (although it’s not sliced thin enough to be carpaccio, maybe that’s why she’s still a line cook) with a black raspberry sea salt. It’s a mouthgasm for Theo, which very quickly turns into a quick shag in the walk-in and voila, the pair are united.
Flashforward 10 years and they’ve moved to Mendocino County where they’re raising their two very American children. The fat kid jokes from the novel and book remain, sort of, but here are fashioned into a storyline of Theo turning the kids into physical maniacs, exercising nonstop. Hikes, burpees, marathons, you name it. Ivy is a homemaker, still making elaborate food creations but now with a deadly raspberry allergy. Theo and the kids keep her EpiPen close when she allows herself to indulge in the deadly red fruit, giving her a life-saving jab. If you think that comes up again later, you’re correct, astute reader.
With a reinvigorated Theo thriving, he gifts Ivy an old seaside crab shack which becomes a hobby restaurant for her, doing 30 covers a week and taking Bed Bath & Beyond coupons from vagrants.. She calls it We’ve Got Crabs!, absolutely something you’d see in the North Bay, but it seems at odds with Ivy’s high cuisine aspirations from the decade prior. She brings on a ragtag bunch of servers, including Ncuti Gatwa and Sunita Mani for not much more than minor comic relief. Flashforward a few more years and Theo is on the cusp of creating his magnum opus, the piece that will be his legacy: the East Bay Maritime Museum, replete with a full-sized sail to mimic a ship atop his lofty building. But at its grand opening, disaster strikes as a severe rainstorm takes out the multi-million dollar structure and Theo becomes a meme-worthy laughingstock. With Theo failing very quickly and Ivy’s business taking off during a century storm in their little town, just as the San Francisco Chronicle food critic happens to be diverted off the freeway and directly to the restaurant, the tables turn on the couple as fast as the restaurant turns tables. It becomes somewhat of an interesting spin on the story, becoming a bit like A Star Is Born.
As Ivy’s stock rises, opening multiple locations and hobnobbing with star chefs like David Chan, she wants to return the favor to Theo and takes him to a bluff to build his dream home, footing the bill for all of it. Theo’s creation is indeed a marvel in every regard, from Julia Childs’ original stove from Paris (which nearly suffers the same fate as the stove in the original film, to the spiral staircase to the wine cellar and its handcarved dining table with an actual dagger from the Spanish Revolution embedded in the centuries old wood. If you think that comes up again later, you’re wrong, unfortunate reader.
Since the seeds of hatred and apathy have already been established, there’s very little in the realm of ‘salad days’ or a honeymoon period for Ivy and Theo. They hurl passive aggressive bon bons right off the bat so we don’t really get to see a relationship erode but in a constant state of both collapse and implosion, like a toxic soufflé.
I say this with no malice, but in the 1989 adaptation of the novel starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner we were in the presence of two of the decade’s biggest and sexiest stars. Stars with a built-in chemistry and cinematic relationship with 1984’s Romancing the Stone and its sequel, The Jewel of the Nile, the following year. Theirs was a combination of steamy, seductive passion and that’s just not present in the form of Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, two of our best journeyman actors whether they’re in lead or supporting roles. They’re both gifted comedians with killer deliveries and they deliver Tony McNamara’s overly complicated barbs of hatred with gleeful smiles. But that’s not the right tone for this, there’s no dark underbelly in the comedy; it’s as frothy as a mushroom foam and just as empty.
In another softening of the darkest elements of the novel and previous film, there’s no cat death or dog paté here, in fact no animals at all. They’ve been replaced with a quartet of friends in an unneeded ensemble that makes the sitcom-level banter even more sitcomy. And it’s not for nothing that the cast is largely great. As Theo’s friend and lawyer (“mostly residential”), Andy Samberg plods through with expected punchline delivery. He’s married to Kate McKinnon…no, really, a sex-thirsty hound dog who literally dry humps Theo’s leg (“We have an open marriage,” she says. They don’t. Yet.) If you’re expecting a different kind of performance from McKinnon than in… anything she’s ever done, keep your hopes down. Another couple, the very funny duo of Zoë Chao and Jamie Demetriou, try to participate in a ‘game’ Theo and Ivy have at dinner, where they trade ‘joke’ insults but end up sounding like Vanessa Bayer’s “Eating crap with these sacks of shit. If they died tomorrow, no one would shed a tear!” Instagram brunch from the I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson sketch show. Like the insults between Theo and Ivy, it’s just a series of nonsensical profanity strung together and spoken at a breakneck speed. Nary is there the cruel simplicity of “When I watch you eat. When I see you asleep. When I look at you lately, I just want to smash your face in,” from the 1989 film or the directness of “I like it when she puts her tongue inside me” from The Favourite. One moment that largely escapes that and feels both very McNamara and very War of the Roses is the brief appearance by Allison Janney as Ivy’s cutthroat lawyer, who looks Theo dead in the eye and says “That she ever let you fuck her, she deserves everything.” Savage, succinct, perfect.
It would be rude of me to spoil the ending of The Roses, even though we have a film and a book that lay it out, but what I will say is it’s a total cop out. Am I mad that Roach’s sauceless Roses eschews the dark comedy of its source and opts for a much more lighthearted version of mean spirited scenes from a marriage, or maybe a better question is, should I be? This is one of those existential issues I think a lot of critics face; am I judging a film on what it should be (or could be) or for what it is? I think the answer is in the middle. The War of the Roses had something to say about the rise of capitalism in the 1980s and how the feminist movement of the 1970s helped make that decade the first for women to strike out on their own and give them the options and opportunities they didn’t have before. But The Roses has no point of view. It’s not saying much about chef culture, or marriage stories, or much of anything. Is it entertaining to watch two of our greatest performers spear each other with nasty one-liners? Unequivocally yes. But with nothing underneath it they may have won the battle but ultimately lost the war.
Grade: C-
Searchlight Pictures will release The Roses only in theaters on August 29.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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