The Wife

Tom Noonan's feature film, The Wife, is in many ways similar to a chamber play - a drama with few characters and events which take place in a relatively short space of time and in a single place. The Wife takes place during a long and intensive evening at the home of a married couple, two New Age therapists; Jack and Rita. Two uninvited guests arrive at their elaborately decorated country house, Cosmo, one of Jack's patients, and his wife Arlie. Cosmo wanted to show Arlie his good friend Jack's fantastic house, but they soon find themselves invited to stay for dinner, to Cosmo's and Arlie's despair. What follows is an explosion of confessions and emotions. The film may be at times pure comic entertainment, articulate and subtle, but in an instant it can become extremely open and delve into the depths of the characters' roles in life, particularly their marriages. We get to know the various characters one by one; Jack, the ruthless therapist who forces unusual behaviour from everyone; as the pill-popping, anaemic wife; Cosmo the nervous middle-aged man with his newly discovered sexual appetite; and Arlie the ex-striptease dancer, turned hairdresser, with a lust for life only exceeded by her cynicism. As the evening progresses, the small cracks in each marriage widen into ravines.The insight the characters' achieve during the evening are very reminiscent of Hjalmar Söderberg when he states his belief in ''the desires of the flesh and the soul's incurable solitude''. The exceptional demands a film of this kind makes on the cast may be responsible for Noonan's decision to work with experienced actors. Tom Noonan not only directed the film but also features as Jack. He has appeared in a number of other films including films by Jim Jarmusch and Michael Mann. The rest of the cast have appeared in films by Woody Allen, Alan Parker, Andrei Konchalovsky and Louis Malle. Despite the predominantly dialogue-based story, the beautiful and intelligent camerawork provides visual stimulation, as do the interesting solutions to how the various characters inter-relate in different parts of the house. The Wife brings to mind films like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and Woody Allen's September (1987), or perhaps a play by Harold Pinter. PAS