It’s hard to imagine a worse-conceived recent film than The Roses, director Jay Roach’s remake of 1989’s Michael Douglas/Kathleen Turner The War of the Roses, with which it shares the source material of Warren Adler’s 1981 novel. So many things go wrong. The film can never decide on a tone, between pitch-dark comedy and straight drama; it’s not funny enough for the former nor serious enough for the latter. Nor can the script decide whether the characters are driven mad by stress, or are full-on psychopaths with substance-abuse issues, something that differs from scene to scene.
The chemistry between the married couple is about nil, the four biggest roles are all egregiously miscast, and worst of all, a film that’s updated for the present barely touches on the 2025 gender wars. Most of the useful ground was covered a few years ago by Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story.
Roach directed the Meet the Parents and Austin Powers movies, which were uneven but had moments. Screenwriter Tony McNamara wrote both The Favourite and Poor Things, but this is a giant misfire. Like the original, The Roses tells the story of a once-happy couple and the bitter dissolution of their marriage. In this case, it’s Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Ivy (Olivia Colman). British transplants to the Bay Area, he’s an architect and she’s a chef. The plot requires him to suffer a career meltdown, while her career skyrockets, leading to tension. But the film goes about this a meandering, laugh-free manner, by giving Cumberbatch a professional humiliation that’s caused by a weather disaster and not his fault.
Because they’re British, the film tosses in some half-assed culture-clash humor, although it might have made more sense to make one spouse British and the other American. Their American friends, coded as liberal Bay Area yuppies, are depicted as gun nuts for some reason. This includes Andy Samberg, all wrong for the role of Theo’s passive-aggressive best friend. Kate McKinnon, as his wife, is off in her own little movie in which she’s throwing herself at characters of every gender, while presumably riffing at all times.
The two leads are talented performers, and they’ve both been funny; I once attended a press conference with Cumberbatch and was struck by just how hilarious he was, and thought he should do more comedy. But the two are stuck playing awful people, who are never believable, as either in love or hating each other. Eventually, they move into an architectural marvel of a house, almost Nancy Meyers-movie level in its beauty, and that becomes the new battleground.
There’s just bad choice after bad choice, starting with an inexplicable scene involving a beached whale, which only reminded me of a famous but much funnier scene from Seinfeld. Theo encourages his kids to be obsessed with fitness in a weird, eating-disorder-inspiring way, in a subplot that never has any payoff. The plot includes contrivances, like a special program that sends their kids off to college, and therefore straight out of the narrative, at age 13. I’m afraid the reaction to this movie is going to be that studio comedy is dead, especially when it’s specifically made for adults. But The Roses is just bad.