The Wife

Novelists tend to be pretentious and pompous as hell. So are films about them, especially when they end with a turn to a blank page, symbolic of the wide-open possibilities of the future and the great novel it will bring (eyes rolling along with the credits). But college professors are the worst of all. Universities are where arrogant losers who can’t accomplish anything in the real world dwell and fester, intent on authority, protected by tenure as they load young, naïve brains of mush full of empty nonsense. It’s where aspiring author Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), then miserable with his cunt of a wife, hooks up with his student Joan, a budding writer. Many years later, as Joe (by that point a world-renowned author) travels with a clearly resentful Joan (now his wife, played by Glenn Close) and their petulant turd of a son to Stockholm, where Joe is to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature, a weaselly biographer brings to light a body of evidence that Joan has been his thankless ghostwriter all these years, toiling in obscurity as he chases skirt and indulges in all that fame brings. Hey, nothing a timely heart attack won’t remedy.

[R]