The Roses
This whole movie isn't big enough for the both of them
dir: Jay Roach
2025
I really wonder what Americans think British people are. Watching a film like this makes you think Americans think Brits are like these polite but profane aliens who don’t really physically exist in the same world as them, but they have those delightful accents, so what’s not to like?
Olivia Colman and Benedict Timothy Carlton “Cumbersomely Named” Cumberbatch are probably great actors who have been great in all sorts of things. They are, shall we say, less than great here. They are game, they’re trying, you can tell they’re trying, but this script, the stuff these Americans make them do in order to amuse other Americans…ugh. It’s ugly.
It’s ugly and unpleasant, and pretends constantly that it’s not, and they play terrible people, so I question how anyone thought this was going to work. I mean, I have no doubt people saw this flick, as in, might have even bought tickets and such, popcorn, the works, maybe on a date night out. Why didn’t they release it around Valentine’s Day, I’m sure some marketing genius is lamenting?
But, fucking hell. I know that the story is based on a book, and I know they made an earlier movie from it starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, and I remember watching that movie, back in the day, when I was still a kid. A young, impressionable kid. I can’t lie I hated that fucking film too, but at least that had some good actors in it. Good American actors, that is.
The novelty was that these two people had starred in these moderately successful romantic action flicks, Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, in which Danny De Vito was also along for the ride, and then the thought was to have a flick where Turner and Douglas play a couple whose divorce gets messy and murderous. Ha ha, so funny, and De Vito can direct and play the third wheel!
I think what I really hate about these kinds of flicks, ones that pretend to be about the breakdown of a relationship or a marriage, is just how inherently dishonest they are. There’s nothing even vaguely hilarious about intimate partner violence, domestic violence, people trying to kill each other. It happens every day. Every week in Australia a woman is murdered by her partner or her former partner. That’s not to ignore the countless thousands of people who endure physical and emotional abuse, threats to murder, threats to suicide, every awful permutation possible, each and every day. Not exclusively women at the hands of men, but the vast majority being women on the receiving end.
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