Steve Pieczenik - OPUS 81 The Wife film review
Aired: 2018-10-06
Duration: 04:12

[00:00:00]  Hi, I'm Dr.
[00:00:01]  Buchanek.
[00:00:02]  Today I want to talk about my nomination for Best Actress and Best Film of 2018.
[00:00:07]  I know it's early, but I just saw a film that was sent to me by Sony Pictures, and it's called The Wife.
[00:00:14]  It stars Glenn Close, a woman and an actress whom I have admired since the Big Chill, Fatal Attraction, and now this incredible persona called The Wife.
[00:00:27]  It's someone who is the wife of a famous novelist played by Jonathan Price, who's born in Brooklyn, a Jewish novelist in 1992, and he is going to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
[00:00:42]  Now, this is an incredible moment in the film because what you have is a dynamic between a very restrained Glenn Close and a pompous Jewish Brooklynite played brilliantly by Jonathan Price and He is so glad.
[00:00:58]  He's glad-handing and he's saying all these patronizing things about Glenn Close that he couldn't have done anything without her.
[00:01:06]  She was instrumental in every decision he made except for one little secret.
[00:01:11]  And I'm not going to tell you that secret because that's part of the beauty of this film.
[00:01:15]  This film was made, and I want to congratulate all the producers from Sweden.
[00:01:20]  It's a Swedish film.
[00:01:21]  It was funded by the Swedes.
[00:01:24]  It cost only about $8 million, so it tells Hollywood that we can make excellent films without big budgets.
[00:01:30]  At the same time, it was directed by a Swedish director who has been in the theater for a long time by the name of Bjorn Ringe, R-U-N-G-E, and he has framed every shot just brilliantly to show the dynamics and the repression of a woman like the wife and how she tolerates the pomposity of the writer and how she restrains herself and
[00:02:00]  becomes extremely elegant.
[00:02:02]  Of course, the editor in this film turns out to be the wife of the director, and her name is Lena Bling, and they both do a brilliant job.
[00:02:11]  I would nominate the film itself for the best film of 2018, but let me proceed with the accolades for Glenn Close.
[00:02:21]  She's an amazing actress.
[00:02:22]  You don't see her very often.
[00:02:24]  I have not seen her very often.
[00:02:26]  I know a little bit about her, and ironically, My life kind of transected through hers, but in a very unusual way.
[00:02:34]  She grew up and went to school in Greenwich, Connecticut.
[00:02:37]  I was an intern at Greenwich Hospital in 1968.
[00:02:43]  Ironically, she owned a cafe in Bozeman, Montana.
[00:02:47]  And in that cafe, I built a company, NBI Health, with my partner.
[00:02:52]  And we spent many weeks there, but I had never met Glenn Close.
[00:02:55]  I think her sister ran that cafe.
[00:02:58]  But it's that touch of irony that makes you feel like in some way you're connected with this actress.
[00:03:04]  But I must admit, this is the first time I have seen Glenn Close so brilliantly restrained, so comfortable in her role, so intelligent, so effortless.
[00:03:15]  In contrast, and I've got to say Jonathan Price, the British actor, did a brilliant job of playing a pompous Jewish writer, probably based on real life of somebody else.
[00:03:26]  The original writer was a woman by the name of Meg Willitzer from Brooklyn, a Jewish woman who was I assume wrote this brilliant novel 14 years ago called The Wife.
[00:03:39]  She herself has always maintained that to become a famous writer in America as a woman is very difficult.
[00:03:47]  And I agree.
[00:03:48]  I have always thought that the women in America are far better writers than the men are.
[00:03:54]  Even though I've been on the bestsellers list, much of it I can attribute to my agents, to my publishers, to my editors, and to my writer, Jeff Rovin.
[00:04:03]  But the truth of the matter is, Carol Burnett said exactly what I feel.
[00:04:08]  I adore this actress named Glenn Close.