Something is unwell in The Wife, the Meg Wolitzer adaptation from director Björn Runge and starring Glenn Close as its titular enigmatic matron. Jonathan Pryce as her husband is a buffoonish novelist being awarded a Nobel Prize for literature, the result of decades of universal praise with Close’s doting Joan at his side. As the family heads to Stockholm for the awards ceremony, it unfolds a mystery about the nature of their partnership, one that cracks the facade of their supposedly picturesque marriage. Too bad we don’t buy any of it – not the initiating circumstances of the secret, nor any of its fallout.
