An unfunny farce about marriage and the doomed West
The pretend farce of The Roses concerns a constantly bickering couple (Benedict Cumberbatch as architect Theo Rose and Olivia Colman as his gourmet-chef wife Ivy) whose mismatched, unhappy marriage is a snarky Hollywood celebration of everything wrong with modern American life.
It’s a deliberately cynical film, manufactured by a class of glib professionals who present the breakdown of the Roses union — introduced with a counseling session that apes the mutual humiliation (“resentment, self-mocking, inability to admit wrongs”) of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Thus begins the filmmakers’ unoriginal nihilistic desire for Western civilization’s doom.
Although this negativity recalls the anti-heteronormative thrust of the last administration, such dread has been around for a while. The Roses is based on the ’80s novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler, who used England’s historic shift of dynastic rule (1455–1487) for a silly pun — a trite parody of yuppie-scum high life as if it mirrored feudal times. In 1989, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner starred in a crude knockabout-farce screen adaptation that was meaninglessly popular.
Now, director Jay Roach, who did the moronic Meet the Fockers and Bombshell, and screenwriter Tony McNamara, who wrote the abysmal Yorgos Lanthimos films The Favourite and Poor Things, follow their usual vulgar patterns. But they both lack the wit and honesty to make their social-economic parable stick.
This failing begins with its cast of unappealing British actors Cumberbatch and Colman, the key players in a supposed romance about prominent emigrants who relocate to the miasma of wealthy America and what’s referred to as “the crucifix of family life.” (The de-aged scenes of their reckless courtship, featuring sex in a restaurant’s pantry, are repellent.)
Roach and McNamara go in for relentless America-bashing to depict Millennial anarchy. The Roses open a restaurant called “We’ve Got Crabs!” and build a conspicuously luxurious Mendocino manse (designed by Theo and financed by Ivy) that becomes the setting for the film’s multinational circus of amoral, atheist careerists. (“God?,” says Ivy, rejecting a compliment from Theo. “Don’t give him credit. I did it.”)
The Roses raise a pair of emotionally distant children — Gen Z clones — who suggest conjugal accidents between the unsexy couple. (He’s a suspiciously coiffed toxic male, she’s a grimacing battle-ax who teases him with her severe food allergy.) Nothing so mundane as infidelity cracks the Roses. They’re simply obnoxious hustlers who wear each other down — and us.
On the way to a climactic slugfest of verbal and physical violence, the Roses indulge guests and co-workers who resemble stereotypical American diversity, as in TV commercials: She indulges a promiscuous black gay waiter and an Indian sous chef; he’s friends with a freakish gun-nut and a sex-crazed couple, played by Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon with SNL snideness. McKinnon smirks “I never thought watching a white man reclaiming his power could be so moving.” The closest Roach and McNamara get to sentimentality is when Theo rescues a beached whale with the solemnity of a religious convert.
As the Roses inflict passive-aggressive attacks (“You’re a bottomless pit of need!” “Hold me!”), their failure to communicate seems artificial. None of the couple’s success, failure, or fame reflects the unsatisfying ups and downs of these times. Roach and McNamara cheat us of understanding ourselves. The Roses plays like a hoax. Hollywood can’t go on making movies like this.
