It’s hard to imagine what a faithful remake of Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses (1989), adapted from the novel by Warren Adler, would look like in 2025. It’s a pitch-black, sickly fable of a marriage felled by material obsessions, driven into a death spiral of attempted murder, assault, and feline fatality.
It’s not that it couldn’t be recreated today, more that the impulse for it isn’t there. Love is hard. We know that. It’s dead and buried in Tinder’s “About me” section. What screenwriter Tony McNamara has teased out in his new iteration, simply named The Roses, is an even crueller tragedy: that two people can be entirely aware of the pitfalls and still drive into them headfirst.
Ivy (Olivia Colman) and Theo Rose (Benedict Cumberbatch) meet in as much of a whirlwind as Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner’s characters did three or so decades ago. Here, he bursts into her restaurant kitchen in order to escape his fellow architects. He eyes up her knife with particular excitement. Instead of bloodshed, however, they walk into the walk-in fridge and have sex.
The rest is a fairytale, so it would seem, until one stormy night, when Ivy’s seaside restaurant – some chintzy affair named “We’ve Got Crabs!” – receives a rave review from a leading food critic, while Theo’s latest architectural venture ends in literal collapse and subsequent disgrace.
Ivy had knowingly (in the feminist way!) put aside her ambitions to raise the kids, yet now finds herself in the position of primary breadwinner and runaway success; Theo knows any jealous pangs he might feel in retaliation are but an ugly piece of patriarchal programming, yet he’s still a human being alive in a world where we’re told life has no meaning beyond our labour. “I could build children instead of houses,” he proposes, before turning son (Ollie Robinson and Wells Rappaport) and daughter (Delaney Quinn and Hala Finley) into protein-guzzling, athletic machines.
Ivy and Theo’s relationship echoes the heated but toxic marriage between Catherine the Great and Peter III, as depicted by McNamara in TV show The Great. There’s a real dexterity to how he tethers the extremes of desire and disgust so closely together that you can barely tell the difference, with an emotionally maximalist wit that feels precious in an era that privileges efficiency and simplicity. Yes, there’s always power in a wordless look, but it can be just as satisfying to chew on a line like, “Never leave me, but when you do, will you kill me on the way out?”
Granted, The Roses has none of its predecessor’s visual imagination (no Kathleen Turner cartwheeling down the stairs). Director Jay Roach sets the look as a kind of aseptic Nancy Meyers knock-off, while Devon does a particularly terrible job of standing in for Northern California, where we’re told the Roses have relocated. Cumberbatch and Colman are surrounded by American grotesqueries, headed by Andy Samberg’s gileted, affluent liberal (“We all loathe but everybody’s got them,” he says, having invited the Roses to a firing range) and his very horny wife (Kate McKinnon), alongside Jamie Demetriou and Zoë Chao.
Yet, they’re mere accessories to Colman and Cumberbatch, longtime friends off screen, quintessentially British stars, and here a single, relentlessly entertaining unit. The pair operate at a low simmer of hysteria that feels farcical without ever losing believability, while treating sincere emotion like the bursting of a dam that threatens to drown them together. They love as they hate in The Roses, decadently and without restraint.
Dir: Jay Roach. Starring: Helen Mirren, Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman, Andy Samberg, Kate McKinnon, Allison Janney, Belinda Bromilow, Sunita Mani, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Demetriou, Zoë Chao Cert 15, 105 minutes
‘The Roses’ is released on 29 August
