Both the 1989 film “The War of the Roses” and the 1981 novel upon which it is based are ostensibly about a marriage that starts out very well and veers horribly, catastrophically, ruinously wrong. Most stories like that would finger-waggingly suggest that the seeds of destruction were there from the start, but not this one, and that’s what makes it so grim: If it could happen to those nice young people, then nobody is safe.
But as I say, that’s the ostensible subject. The real point of “The War of the Roses” is that the Roses’ creeping attachment to their money is the actual killer, the silent third party in their marriage. Perhaps they’d have split up anyway — lots of couples do, after all — but what really ruins their lives is the things they both feel they own and neither can give up, even if one or the other might have the more rightful claim. It’s because they’re rich that things turn into — well, it’s right there in the title, isn’t it.
That original film, directed by Danny DeVito, has a daringly nasty edge to it because its framing device is its divorce lawyer narrator, advising a client to be extremely generous or, barring that, just reconsider his divorce altogether, so as not to end up like the Roses. It’s pecuniary advice, in the end, not romantic. With that setup, you know the movie will dare to go full bananas, and so it does, never flinching. That’s precisely what made it good: It has an almost anti-Hollywood ending, the perfect antithesis to living happily ever after, which is satisfying in a totally twisted way.
So it is equally unsatisfying to say that “The Roses,” a remake directed by Jay Roach with a screenplay by Tony McNamara, seems to have missed that memo entirely. Lacking that smart framing device, it flinches, and goes conventional, and bad.
This is not the fault of its leads. How delightful to see Benedict Cumberbatch in a role involving neither cape nor costume. Here he plays Theo Rose, a handsome British architect with big ideas about living, breathing buildings and a petulant side that he manages to hide pretty well for the first decade or so of his marriage. His wife is Ivy, played by the always wonderful Olivia Colman. Ivy is a talented but underemployed chef, and the sparks that fly upon their meeting in London threaten to sizzle the tuna carpaccio she’s fiddling with behind her unimaginative boss’s back.
Ten years later they’ve moved to fancy Montecito and have two children, and this is where our story really begins: a tale of ambition and woe. The basic problem is this: Theo, feeling benevolent as his career veers upward, suggests to Ivy that she start a little seafood cafe; it’s not a hit, but she’s happy to be cooking for someone other than Theo and their somewhat lugubrious twins. But one fateful night, Theo’s fortunes fall while Ivy’s skyrocket, and the resulting upheaval sends everything on a path toward madness.
The Roses’ closest friends are Barry (Andy Samberg) and Amy (Kate McKinnon), meant to provide some kind of foil to the pair; they’re not happy, exactly — Amy is constantly propositioning both Theo and Ivy, in terms so awkwardly hilarious it’s almost certain McKinnon is ad-libbing them — but they stick it out because they can’t imagine not doing so. But they also feel airlifted out of a different film altogether, which, while it might be the point, feels jarring in the middle of this movie.
There are hints throughout “The Roses” of what might have been, if — oh, honestly, I don’t really know what happened here. McNamara’s sense of humor can be so bizarre and wicked that I’m inclined to think it was softened somewhere along the way: He’s the architect of screenplays like “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” and even “Cruella” has a suitably maniacal edge to it. In places the puckishly clever bits peek out, like when Theo and Ivy announce their plans to split to their teenage twins, who instantly announce their absolute delight and then sign off from the video call, to their parents’ consternation. Or in the very British insults the pair sling at one another in the horrified marriage counselor’s office, only to walk out chuckling with one another, clearly bonded by the experience.
But other stretches feel smoothed out, mollified, defanged. And while some of the same motifs appear by the end that are in the novel and the earlier movie, they take forever to arrive. It’s all flattened out, without the same tense and mean ramp-up — a flatness that, by the end, the characters themselves seem to recognize. Perhaps it’s true that the differing gender dynamics of 1989 and 2025 have simply changed how a split like this happens. But then, why tell the story so boringly?
I’ve come to the conclusion that your opinion of the Roses — both cinematic iterations of them, really — is probably a bit of a Rorschach test, though I’m a little too scared to decide what for, exactly. Who is at fault here? Personally, I’m inclined to think most of the blame is Theo’s; he can’t deal with his wife becoming more successful than him, and to preserve his own elevated self-image, concocts elaborate schemes of self-righteousness to make her feel bad for being good at what she does. Others have suggested they’re both to blame, that it takes two to tango on this front, and maybe they’re right.
But really I’m not here to litigate the Roses; I’m here to litigate “The Roses,” and on that front I’m quite confident that it’s a strangely boring failure, whoever’s at fault. To borrow and mangle a line from another wise story of marital woe, happy households are all alike, but every unhappy household should at least be unhappy in its own weird, deeply grim way.
The Roses
Rated R for tremendously bad behavior on everyone’s part and some very nasty potty mouths. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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