Glenn Close Stuns in 'The Wife' at the Summer KCET Cinema Series on July 24th
Q&A immediately following with Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Annie Starke and director Björn Runge.
“There’s nothing more dangerous than a writer whose feelings have been hurt.” A foreboding line that hints at turmoil to come in a film where the audience is reminded: behind every “great” man is an even greater woman. From Swedish director Björn Lennart Runge, “The Wife” stars Glenn Close as Joan…the devoted and forgotten wife married to the self-absorbed writer Joe played by Jonathan Pryce. Their relationship is anything but ideal and as the story unfolds we see that Joan has sacrificed her own ambitions to fan the flames of her husband’s career and ego. The plot takes an unexpected turn on the eve of Joe's Nobel Peace Prize for Literature.
“It was probably one of the trickiest roles I’ve ever confronted,” Close recently told Vanity Fair. “I think it’s a situation that every woman in the audience can relate to, whether they’re of younger generations or not. [Joan] was part of my mother’s generation, and I certainly saw her be totally deferential to my dad,” added Close. “In her late 80s she’d say, ‘I feel like I accomplished nothing in my life.’ Looking back, it is so tragic because she was such an amazingly gifted woman. She just didn’t have the toolbox to strike out on her own… Joan’s diminished [in her marriage], and it has become such a habit that she doesn’t really notice anymore. She doesn’t have the vocabulary to give voice to her growing anger — to say, ‘what did you just say to me?’ — so she lets it slide. It finally comes to a point where her cup is so full of anger that it overflows.”
“The Wife,” based on the 2003 Meg Wolitzer novel, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2017 and will be released in theaters on August 3 by Sony Pictures Classics. Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Annie Starke and director Björn Runge will be in attendance for a Q&A session immediately following the screening with host Pete Hammond who can also be seen in KCET’s Must See Movies.
The summer season of the KCET Cinema Series is generously sponsored by the James and Paula Coburn Foundation as well as Deadline.com. The season began on June 5th and runs through July 31st. Season passes are available online via Eventbrite. Single admissions are not available at the door for this week’s screening of “The Wife”.