Synopsis
A sudden visit from a patient and his unstable, outrageously candid wife leads to a delirious night of shattering revelations for a husband and wife team of therapists.
The Wife
Director
Producers
Writer
Original Writer
Editor
Cinematography
Assistant Director
Executive Producers
Lighting
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Production Design
Art Direction
Composer
Sound
Costume Design
Releases by Date
Premiere
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USA
Source: IMDB (Sundance Film Festival)
Theatrical limited
21 Apr 1995
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USA
Theatrical
16 Aug 1996
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USA
Releases by Country
USA
19 Jan 1995
- Premiere Source: IMDB (Sundance Film Festival)
21 Apr 1995
- Theatrical limited USA Film Festival
16 Aug 1996
- Theatrical
Popular reviews
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“Just take a breath, and talk about your feelings.” An impromptu dinner party slowly transforming into a scorched-earth battlefield, something like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? reimagined for the self-help set. “Are you happy now?” “What is that supposed to mean?” If Jack and Rita’s boho therapists work in the gauzy New Age rhetoric of self-actualization and authenticity, then their unexpected guest of one especially complicated patient’s wife prefers the expletive-laden stuff of pure, bilious id (“The eternal conflict between the upper and lower chakras”). Arlie’s naked hostility seems at first like a shocking intruder, though the more the booze keeps flowing, and by the time blissed-out chants are being replaced by Quaaludes, her misanthropy and spite become less taboo-breaking…
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Laborious 90s indie lip service and slight self-indulgent wanking, mostly in the first half, gives way to a pretty brilliant second half, full of truly broken people, flailing in their own disappointments and insecurities. It feels more restrained than the Cassavetes it loves, but finds an array of graceful moments in the smaller, quieter gestures. Ends so painfully beautiful. The dialogue is natural but also not particularly great. It’s Noonan’s staging and blocking that really elevates those lesser moments. His camera is roaming and anxious just like the characters. Everything is uneasy, a bit askew, a breakdown is inevitable, but everyone is praying for a breakthrough. Wallace Shawn in his final scene here is just putting on a masterclass. Nobody is better at acting a play on screen than Shawn and this is a great example of the age old sub-genre of put Wallace Shawn at a table and let him go!
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A film begging for a restoration (Oscilloscope? Anyone?), and I suspect that as was very much the case with What Happened Was, it's probably a more visually accomplished film than it appears in its less-than-ideal current state. But even as a subpar dvd transfer, I'm still able to appreciate Noonan's canny shifts in lighting and some creative blocking (particularly that longish single take that uses a well-positioned mirror to create a split-screen effect). Between his two films, no director gives me more ideas about how to inventively shoot in a single location than Noonan does.
I'm sure it's partially because of the available image quality, but this does feel like a slightly less stylistically precise film than Noonan's debut. The…
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i love this era of indie movies either adapted from a play or that are staged like one and are marked by degrees of sophistication and wry humor without being too cloyingly self-aware or cynical about their characters.
obviously this is like a new age edward albee. you love to see these chaotic people booze it up and unspool their unhealthy boundaries.
impromptu dance scenes in non-musicals are extremely MY SHIT so when Wallace Shawn dances with Julie Hagerty to that beautifully schmaltzy vaguely French seduction track, i was all over it. these are the types of moments that are magical to me, especially when presented thru a veil of poignancy or pity.
in the scene, which is drenched in…
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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, if Martha were married to Nick and George to Honey. I'm not sure why anyone would want to make a movie that so readily invites comparisons to Nichols's masterpiece (compared to this movie, Carnage is far removed from Woolf), but Tom Noonan acquits himself admirably enough. In lieu of college academics, we get a husband-and-wife New Age therapy team and one of their patients (along with the titular wife), though Noonan avoids caricature and more or less plays it straight. Playing the male therapist himself, Noonan perfectly balances arrogance ("You're talking to me about chakras?") with genuine compassion, and he's always fascinating to watch . As a director, he makes dynamic use of editing and…
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really bizarre- doubles down on the best aspects of "What Happened Was..." Wallace Shawn is so fucking funny
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Actor Tom Noonan directs this claustrophobic pas de quatre featuring two couples who couldn't have arranged a worse dinner than the one which erupts. Eastern medicine therapists Julie Haggerty and Noonan are interrupted by patient Wallace Shawn and his brash wife Karen Young, and things fall apart from there. Noonan intended this to be a play, which is awkward for the medium of film but that doesn't kill the effort. The performances are uniformly excellent, impelled by Noonan's direction which pits members of the dinner party against one another in shifts. There's a lot of Albee here, to its credit, and Noonan has a great familiarity with all the players which gives him a daring advantage in getting them to go to extremes. In fact, he was married to Karen Young at the time of the shoot.
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This is only a preliminary review before the remastering, then I’ll get the whole picture. Some SUPER interesting cinematography and blocking choices that were pretty ahead of their time. So excited to get to see it with a crisp new transfer.
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There's a lot to be said about The Wife that I don't have the words to say. My thoughts are a little scattered, but I deeply value this film.
The staging is purely theatrical but the camera work is nothing short of cinematic. The script demands these sorts of closeups in particular, but the general framing brings the project to life. The shot where Jack and Cosmo begin their therapy in the mirror while Rita and Arlie talk in the kitchen is one of my favorite shots I've seen in a very long time.
There are flavors of Twin Peaks scattered throughout - some explicit, like the mention of a Dr. Jacoby and others implicit, like the framing choices made…
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