One of my favorite scenes in The Roses is the first one, where Ivy and Theo Rose are at a relationship counseling session. They’ve been asked to compile lists of the ten things they still love about each other, and it’s immediately clear that they each struggled to come up with more than one.
But when Olivia Colman as Ivy finishes delivering the last one — a string of angry insults that she didn’t even bother to disguise, calling him a wanker and the C-word1Colman has repeatedly said in interviews that she judges people based on how they react to the C-word, so I would fail to be her friend because I can never not call it “the C-word,” which is a shame because she seems absolutely awesome and I am an enormous fan. — there’s a beat, and then she and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Theo both crack up laughing, while the counselor looks on horrified. As they leave the office, they’re joking with each other that the counselor shouldn’t even be allowed to tell couples that there’s no hope for reconciliation, and that it was very unprofessional of her.
The reason I love that scene is because it does so much to establish the characters and their relationship, as well as the tone of the movie and what it’s going to be doing, all in one scene. It’s establishing that the movie’s not going to be pulling its punches, but it’s also not just an exercise in nihilism for its own sake. You can see immediately that this isn’t a couple who’s just going through a rough patch; they have serious, long-running issues that won’t be resolved with just a counseling session and a mutual apology. But there’s still the core of something that makes them perfect for each other, so there’s still a chance that the movie could end differently from what you expect.
It’s especially remarkable considering that the filmmakers aren’t sure what the audience is going to expect. A lot of people are likely to be coming in knowing little other than that it’s got two extremely charismatic movie stars playing a fighting married couple. Meanwhile, people closer to my age are inevitably going to be comparing it to the 1989 adaptation of the book from Danny DeVito, Kathleen Turner, and Michael Douglas, and coming in with a huge set of expectations based on that.
I really liked that movie when it came out, and I remember its feeling unlike anything I’d seen from a Hollywood movie before. My memory of it has aged about as well as my memory of myself from that time period, though: it was a movie for edgelords before anybody was using the term “edgelords.” Its feeling unlike anything else from Hollywood was the entire point. Which more or less doomed it to irrelevance.
All I remember from it are the pointedly cruel moments. Turner insisting that letting the kids have sweets whenever they want means they’ll not see it as special and therefore never get fat, and then fast forward a few years to where the kids are both fat. Accidentally killing the family cat, and then in retaliation, deliberately killing and eating the family dog2And I remember the controversy at the time where a brief shot of the dog still alive was included in the final cut, probably because of studio objections that DeVito had crossed the line.. And of course, the iconic final scene as they both lie underneath the chandelier, and Douglas makes one last gesture of reconciliation.
I also remember the last monologue from DeVito’s lawyer character, which starts with (paraphrased), “So what can we learn from this, apart from the fact that cat people should marry cat people and dog people should marry dog people?” It’s a good line, obviously, or I wouldn’t still remember it so many years later. But it draws attention to how there’s not much of anything at the movie’s core.
It exists to be mean. And I think that’s entirely deliberate. It was extremely reactionary, specifically intended to be a rejection of the Hollywood formula with happy endings or valuable lessons and a list of taboos you absolutely should never break.
So I can imagine some people watching The Roses and going away feeling like it sanded down the rough edges. That it couldn’t fully commit to being a satirical black comedy. That it refused to let its characters go over the line into being irredeemable. I completely disagree, for two reasons: the first is that there’d simply be no point in going for shock value. That’s already been done. And the bar for shock value has been raised so high by 2025 that they’d have to behave so deplorably as to be completely unlikeable.
The more important reason is that the movie is back to being about something more than satire. It’s very funny and often silly, much funnier than I remember The War of the Roses ever being, but the couple at its core feel genuine and interesting.
I don’t recall anything from The War of the Roses that showed me why Douglas and Turner’s characters fell in love with each other. I just kind of took it for granted because they were movie stars and besides didn’t you all see Romancing the Stone? I mean that’s chemistry!
But Ivy and Theo’s first meeting is instantly electric. You can see why there’s an immediate attraction: She’s charming and obviously talented, but so flippant and sardonic that you can tell that people have a hard time reading her. Meanwhile, he really is kind of a self-important wanker, but not so delicate that he can’t laugh at his own expense, and he can return her banter perfectly and effortlessly. They both seem to know exactly what they want, and what they want at the moment is exactly the same thing.
And that carries on throughout. There does seem to be a genuine connection between the two of them that never gets lost amidst their increasingly dysfunctional marriage.
There’s an interesting twist in this version, where Colman and Cumberbatch’s Britishness is used for maximum effect, instead of just “we wanted to cast these two.” All of Theo’s extremely awful American friends3Including, humorously, Jamie Demetriou doing an accent think it’s fun and fascinating and so British how Ivy and Theo can so casually say cruel things to each other without losing the affection that’s underneath. There’s a disastrous dinner party where they try it themselves, and they fail horrifically, both because they’re just not clever people, but because they’re all buried under tons of resentment for each other that they aren’t able to conceal.
It’s funny but also clever because it shows that there’s really nothing “British” about it; Ivy and Theo are unique because they understand each other, and might be the only people in the world who can genuinely understand each other. But they’re also so casually sardonic that they get the pressure release of feeling like their resentments are getting revealed and resolved, when they’re actually being dismissed as a joke. At one point, Ivy cheerfully tells Theo “I hate everyone besides us,” and it’s perfectly charming, but you can also tell how true it is.
Another thing I don’t remember from The War of the Roses is whether the problems with the relationship felt so one-sided. In The Roses, it feels as if literally everything in the movie is ultimately Theo’s fault. There’s a little bit of a 21st century gender swap here, where it’s Theo who’s resentful of having to take care of the kids while Ivy is occupied with work, but that arrangement is because of Theo’s arrogance which led to a very public failure, and Ivy did the same for years without complaining. She accuses him of a ton of faults, and they all seem evident4And significantly, he acknowledges at one point that she’s right, but her only real flaw seems to be that she’s so flippant and sardonic that she fails to treat anything with their relationship seriously.
I’m still not sure whether I consider that to be a problem with the movie, though. Making their relationship feel more genuine, instead of just a vehicle for black comedy, means recognizing that adult relationships and adult arguments aren’t always about who’s right and who’s wrong, but about what’s really important.
Ultimately, the most shocking thing about The Roses is that it presents two characters designed just to be a ticking time bomb counting down until everything explodes in cruelty and violence, but I still cared about what happened to them.