I had intended to do a different movie for this post but decided with recent events to focus on something else. Just a reminder, this post may contain spoilers.
The War of the Roses is one of the best satirical black comedies ever. What makes it work is the era in which it was released. A second adaptation of Warren Adler’s book by the same name is scheduled to be released with Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman. Despite its dark nature and being released during the Christmas holiday season, the 1989 version was a huge success at the box office and with critics.
I think that many people of the era were stuck in loveless marriages or messy divorces. Someone I grew up with is turning 50 and unmarried. She has two daughters but is weary of men because they have wronged her before. More women today are willing to trade a marriage of convenience for a single life of more leisure.
The movie was the third and as of this post final pairing of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner after Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile. Danny DeVito, who directs, also appears again. But this is not a sequel to those movies. Yet, it helps that we’ve seen all these three actors together which I think helped the movie.
What also helps is that both Douglas and Turner have been great at playing heroes and villains. And they had that hostility between them when they played Jack T. Colton and Joan Wilder respectively in the previous movies. Even despite the movie’s bleak ending, it was a huge success, which I think says more about audiences likes and anticipation. The marketing for the movie even played up the savagery of the plot with a tune to the “Twelve Days of Christmas.”
So, going into the movie, people knew there was the possibility that a dog would end being eaten by Douglas’ Oliver as pate. The dog survives though as DeVito has said it was intended all along. However, a cat does die and Oliver’s reaction to it makes you hate him more. That’s not to say that Turner’s Barbara is an angel. At one point, she pretends to give the dog, Benny, treats but instead gives them to her cat.
DeVito as Gavin D’Amato, a corporate lawyer and friend to the Roses, tells their story in flashback to a client (Dan Castellenata). Oliver and Barbara meet circa 1970 at an estate auction on Nantucket Island. This is some nice foreshadowing. They actually both bid for an item where Barbara wins by bidding $50. Just for reference, that’s over $400 in today’s dollars.
Oliver is a law student at Harvard but says he’s on scholarship. Barbara is also a college student on a gymnastics scholarships. They chitchat and then take the ferry back to the mainland where they end up having sex. (I’m also suspecting that Barbara gets pregnant and they end up getting married because that’s what a lot of people did back then and still do.)
Very soon, we can see there’s trouble in paradise as when their kids are born, Oliver isn’t prepared for the family life as he’s a young lawyer. He also has his own way of doing things as Barbara brings off a glittery cardboard star to put on the Christmas tree but Oliver doesn’t like it. There’s a lot of little things in bad relationships that just build up. Sometimes it works. Other times it doesn’t.
Like a Baby Boomers, Oliver and Barbara found themselves backed into a way of life neither of them were prepared for. A lot of people from this era had their plans put on hold indefinitely for what they wanted to do with their lives. Oliver climbs up the corporate ladder as a successful lawyer but Barbara says she finds her life unfulfilled.
Even though Oliver tells Barbara he’s not rich when they meet, he was probably from an upper middle-class family. Having watched a lot of John Hughes movies in the 1980s, it makes me laugh of how these people act like they’re not well-off. In Lost in America, Albert Brooks’ character quits a job where he’s making over $100,000 for 1985 dollars. The house where Molly Ringwald’s Andie lived in Pretty in Pink wasn’t a poor house to many people who grew up in the same houses.
I’ve often thought of people who lived in the “poor houses” was substandard Section 8 housing. I mean my mother grew up in the country and she didn’t have electricity until she was a senior in high school. My dad said they would burn all their trash in a barrel in the backyard. It’s obvious the 1980s was an era of excess and excessive wealth.
At one point in the movie where Oliver hosts a dinner party for all the partners in his law firm, Barbara has the children come out dressed in their night robes to say “good night” lke the Von Trapp family. And she later wants to regale the partners with a boring story about how they were able to buy china glasses off a couple. Barbara is one of those people who probably saw herself rising to the upper echelon of high society.
Oliver and Barbara are about showing off their wealth. Douglas had just won the Oscar for his role as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. And Oliver is a nice cousin to that as he drives a Morgan and wears fancy suits and has his own private office in his house where Barbara stands near the doorway at one point timidly afraid to come in and disturb him.
They have a nice mansion of a house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. that Barbara found because she was constantly going around asking people if they would consider selling their houses. She just happened upon this one because the owner had recently passed. Then, she spends years trying to get all the best and appropriate furniture and trinkets to place on end tables. I’m reminded of the line from Fight Club, “Thing you own end up owning you.”
One thing DeVito does is have many scenes filmed within the house as it almost turns into a prison. When Oliver has a heart attack scare, Barbara doesn’t go to the hospital because she realizes she no longer loves Oliver. She tells him she wants a divorce and Oliver offers her half, but she wants the entire house and all the materials, using a letter Oliver wrote when he felt he might be dying.
It’s a dick move on Barbara’s part but I think it’s included to give her the same lack of sympathy as Oliver. Gavin drops a line that Barbara grew up in a lower income family, so her desire it seems to be upper class. She’s got the corporate lawyer husband and the fancy house. But she doesn’t have a life of her own and has started a catering service. Yet, she’s using the prestige of the lifestyle to move her business alone, which is why she needs the house and all the materials.
I think it’s because people in general by 1989 were tired of sitcoms of people who live in houses where they could never afford in real life. It’s funny how both movies were produced by James L. Brooks who would have the hit TV show The Simpsons beginning at the same time. The Simpsons were a one-income family that had a nice house in the suburbs. Yet on the flip side, you had Roseanne that showed a family that was struggling.
Reaganomics and the 1987 Wall Street crash followed by all the saving and loan scandals had soured Americans. The economic boom that had sprung up in the post-World War II era was starting to collapse creating the Rust Belt and the increase of outsourcing jobs to other countries. While it seems that Oliver may still have some love for Barbara, it’s apparent doesn’t care at all for him and she secretly wished he had died as she would’ve had all his assets.
By the time of the final act, Oliver and Barbara have become violent toward each other and they’ve locked themselves in their house refusing to give in to the other. As the audience watches them, we don’t have sympathy for either as they act like children fighting over use of the TV. While you can initially see why neither one wants to relent, but by the end, they drive a hedge through the relationships with their children, Josh (Sean Astin) and Carolyn (Heather Farfield).
Oliver even damages his friendship with Gavin. And it’s obvious their fighting is stretching beyond the barriers of the house as Barbara drives her truck with big tires over Oliver’s Morgan which becomes the final symbolism their marriage is over and their reputation is ruined. On the surface, DeVito films all this with a slapstick comedy vibe. But pulling back the layers, you know just how disturbing it is.
While Adler titled the novel in reference to the warring houses of York and Lancaster, I think it also shows how roses show a delicate beauty but below, there are thorns which can be dangerous and hurt people. I’m not saying any relationship should be one where someone walks on eggshells, but you have to be considerate and delicate of what you’re holding onto.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 