The smart summer movie for adults used to be enough of a rarity in the era when people were going to the movies all the time. Now that many people are used to, and often prefer, watching at home, it has virtually disappeared. And yet, inching in just under the late-summer wire, here comes Jay Roach’s jaunty black comedy The Roses, in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman play Theo and Ivy, a well-off middle-aged couple whose marriage hits the skids. Whether you find a comedy about a couple falling apart comforting or upsetting may come down to temperament; The Roses, with its thorny pleasures, may not be everyone’s idea of a fun night out. Even so, Roach and his actors get at certain truths about couplehood that apply to even the most well-matched lovebirds. You can of course watch The Roses at home, eventually. But a movie like this is better seen with an audience. When other people laugh at terrible things—that is, things that are funny in a terrible way—something kicks free in us, too. And if you can laugh about other couples’ problems, maybe yours aren’t so bad after all.
The Roses—adapted by screenwriter Tony McNamara from Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses, also the source for the 1989 film of that name with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner—follows Ivy and Theo’s story from somewhere in the middle. As their troubles escalate, they’ve decided to try marriage counseling, and the therapist is shocked at the hostility they fling at each other. But their list of complaints about one another is so long and so outlandish that once they’ve finished up, they look at each other and burst out laughing. These are people who enjoy one another’s company above all else. In happier times, Ivy will say to Theo, “I hate everyone but us,” and it’s noteworthy that she doesn’t say “everyone but you.” These two are like astronauts in a space capsule, a unified front against the vast unknown.
We see how they met: Theo, a London architect, leaves a restaurant meeting in a huff—his colleagues have no concept of how real people live or what they want or need in a building. He escapes into the kitchen and, in a stroke of great good luck, meets a real person there, Ivy, a chef. They flirt madly and fall in love instantly, even before they’ve had a quickie in a refrigerated locker. Before they know it, they’ve married, had two kids, and moved to America, the Bay Area specifically.
Everything is great until it becomes terrible, and Roach frames Ivy and Theo’s history in energetic little vignettes. Ivy is a great mom, one who wants her kids to explore and be creative. Though she loves cooking and coming up with imaginative desserts, she’s not particularly interested in a career, though she does like Theo’s idea of renovating an old shack and turning it into a seafood restaurant, where she’ll work just a few days a week. (It’s she who chooses the name: We’ve Got Crabs.) Theo, the family’s chief breadwinner, is about to unveil a fantastic seafaring museum, built to look like a ship, complete with a finlike sail rising majestically from its roof. Then the worst possible thing happens: the building collapses during a rainstorm—the same storm that provides an unexpected windfall for Ivy’s business. She suggests, with earnest generosity, that Theo take a break from the architecture biz and stay at home with the kids, while she devotes more time to the restaurant. She becomes a star chef, addicted to the limelight; meanwhile, Theo’s morale sinks lower and lower, and he takes charge of the child-rearing duties as if he were training a miniature army. Under his tutelage, the kids become excellent, driven athletes. Ivy is rankled; she’d raise them differently if she could spend more time with them, but her career is taking a shape she hadn’t expected. Minor annoyances suddenly widen into a chasm neither can cross. How can two people who clearly love each other so much become so alienated?
Cumberbatch and Colman make it all believable, their jokes pinging off one another with delightful, rancorous buoyancy. At one point, when Ivy returns from a work trip, she’s tired and Theo is cranky; it appears sex is off the table for the night. Theo proposes a substitute: “How about a three-hour circular argument that goes nowhere?” They dissolve into laughter over that one, because come on: it’s funny. As Theo, Cumberbatch has just enough edge: he doesn’t suffer fools, which is why he loves Ivy. Colman plays Ivy with the kind of bubbly vitality that can be great fun one minute and as explosive as a shaken-up champagne bottle the next. The movie’s grand centerpiece is a dinner party where Theo and Ivy go at each other with such viciousness that their guests can only stand by and watch, aghast. They’re destroying each other, for laughs—it’s not pretty, and it’s not really even that funny.
But we’ve come this far with them; what’s left to do but go the distance? It doesn’t hurt that The Roses is gorgeous to look at, bathed in luscious natural light and featuring lots of sleek mod-house porn. (The cinematographer is Florian Hoffmeister; Mark Ricker is the production designer.) This doesn’t feel like a tossed-off thing made to be devoured in a few idle hours at home; it fills up the big screen with a kind of bitter-lemon-scented voluptuousness. Roach, director of movies like the three Austin Powers pictures and, more recently, Bombshell, isn’t about to give up on the big-movie experience easily.
The Roses is funny, but there’s something piercing about it too. We know these two are right for each other, for the long haul; why can’t they see it? But their problems are also so universal that watching them struggle is weirdly comforting. Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon play Ivy and Theo’s closest friends, a longtime married couple, and at one point, a desperate Theo goes to Samberg’s Barry for advice. “How do you and Amy make it work?” he asks. “I dunno,” Barry answers. “Inertia.” It’s a flippant answer, but there’s truth in it, too. Sometimes just going along from day to day can get you further than you think.
The open-ended conclusion of The Roses may be the best thing about it. We need to imagine a happy ending for these two, but Roach isn’t about to hand it over easily. Ivy and Theo’s love will transcend time, even if it ends up tearing them apart. The movie’s end-credits song is a wry, mischievous cover of The Turtles’ sunshine-and-flowers ode to romantic bliss “Happy Together,” sung by Susanna Hoffs (of the Bangles, and also Roach’s wife) and Rufus Wainwright. Though it’s ostensibly a joyous song, there’s something clear-eyed and cautious about it too. It’s a song about two people believing so strongly in joint happiness that they’re certain they can will it into being, even if they’re a little nervous about making the thing work long-term. And then a line in the song bursts forth like a sunrise: “I can’t see me loving nobody but you, for all my life.” That’s true of the Roses, for better or worse. They’ve taken the lines “Til death do us part” seriously. Not even a messy divorce could tear them asunder.
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