Rating:
Summary: The Roses takes a very cynical view of marriage, all marriage, but there is a seed of a great movie in there.
1989's "The War of the Roses" was always a favourite of mine. The film, directed by Danny DeVito, who is also a co-star along with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, took your run of the mill divorce situation and turned it into something much more toxic.
So a remake in the form of Jay Roach's "The Roses" seems like a good idea. Instead of taking some minor tweaks to the source material, the novel by Warren Adler from which the 1989 film takes its name, as most remakes tend to do, there have been some significant changes. Whereas the catalyst for the first film's marriage troubles stems from something more subtle, a slow dissipation of the love between Douglas and Turner, the new film introduces the idea of shame, jealousy, toxic masculinity, and major character flaws for both couples that end up being the cause.
Benedict Cumberbatch is Theo, a successful architect who is married to Olivia Colman's Ivy, an up-and-coming chef who gives up her career to be a full-time mum. While both are initially supportive of each other in all their endeavours, a turn of events soon turns the professional fortunes of both on their heads, and it is the beginning of the end.
What makes "The Roses" really work is the clever dissection of issues that couples face in almost every marriage. This is probably where the movie is most frightening. While we all like to think our own relationships would never turn into the kind of toxic mess that the Roses eventually face, the seeds of their marriage disaster do not seem unfamiliar or uncommon. So if it can happen to them, maybe it can happen to ...
There is a wide cast of supporting characters, including fellow couple friends played by Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, Jamie Demetriou and Zoë Chao who face their own exaggerated marriage problems. This is where the film, perhaps unintentionally, takes a very cynical view of marriage - it seems there aren't any good ones, only ones that people find some convoluted way to make them work. A more nuanced approach to marriage would perhaps have made "The Roses" a stronger film, one that provides a timely warning to all married couples about the dangers lurking in every marriage. So "The Roses" is not a date movie, that's for sure, unless one or both couples have plans to exit the relationship and they need some help in this regard.
As modern comedies go, "The Roses" is well done and quite enjoyable, with enough laugh-out-loud moments to keep the movie going. What fails it, and what fails most modern comedies, is the pacing and the constant attempt to find humour when something more subtle would have worked better. Case in point, the supporting characters, each more over the top than the other - it screams "trying too hard", and it makes the film less grounded in reality.
Specifically to "The Roses" in terms of problems with pacing and structure is how long the film spends building up to the "war" for the Roses, and not enough time on the "war" itself. The third act is devoted to the various acts of sabotage, humiliation, vandalism and violence, basically what we turned up for, but it all feels a bit rushed. It feels like a lot of it ended up on the cutting room floor. This is not to say the first two thirds of the film was unnecessary, and I appreciated how the film didn't just jump straight to the "gimmick", and tried to create well filled out characters and a backstory (the opposite of what it did with the side characters) - keep all of that, but adding more to the third act would have satisfied me more. Basically, more "dark" in a film that's marketed as a dark comedy.
I re-watched the 1989 film after watching "The Roses", and I can safely say that the "remake" is the better film, even though I enjoyed both films in their own way.
"The Roses" is in Australian cinemas on 4 September 2025. Australian streaming release date: TBA
