"My fee is $450 an hour, and when a man who makes $450 wants to tell you something for free, you should listen." So says Gavin D'Amato, played by Danny DeVito, a high priced lawyer who kicks off "War of the Roses" by offering a cautionary tale to a man considering divorce. This cautionary tale, of course, is the film we're about to watch. As he is also the director of "War of the Roses", DeVito functions as both the narrator inside and outside of the film.
D'Amato's tale is about acquisitions, possessions and the power of money, so the lawyer's early mentioning of cash is significant. In offering his advice for free, however, D'Amato sets himself up as being morally apart from the world he is about to describe. He is a voice of reason, or so he would like us to think.
D'Amato's tale? Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas play The Roses, a wealthy couple who first meet at an auction (this meeting place is fitting; the duo battle over objects from the onset). With marriage then comes riches, happiness, big houses, and many garish possessions, the film painting a now familiar Utopian image of late 1980s Reganism. When the passion of romance fades, however, the couple instigate a bitter, violent divorce. From here on, the film becomes a dark comedy, a demented version of "Citizen Kane", each self-obsessed partner blaming the other for their psychoses, and each becoming maddeningly preoccupied with acquisitions, possessions, inventories, objects and artifacts, to the complete exclusion of everything else. As the marriage crumbles, the couple become so obsessed with surfaces (the film takes place at "Christmas", man's festive ode to consumerism) that they conduct a literal, and quite violent, war in their own opulent mansion. Set in Washington DC (military-looking helicopters constantly fly over apocalyptic, DC skylines), the militaristic tone of the movie has obvious, larger ramifications. The capital of the United States is capital. Nothing else matters. Cue much violence and possessiveness, culminating, fittingly, in DeVito directing a biopic of trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa three years later.
It's a very good film, handsomely directed by DeVito, whose love for Hitchcock is apparent throughout. Douglas and Turner also do well, chewing scenery left, right and centre. Both have always been drawn to dark roles. Here they satirise their romantic unions in the "Romancing the Stone" movies, in which their both starred, and also a number of their previous films, in which Douglas is typically a yuppie careerist, a greedy scoundrel, a man who's consumed by dangerous women and exhibits drives toward power and success through money, while Turner is typically a femme-fatalle or marginalised woman driven to further exclusion. In "War of the Roses" the duo both play toward these now familiar roles, whilst also laying bare the crassness behind them. The shock of the movie is not that the Rose's rosy marriage fails, or even that the couple are willing to kill to keep their possessions, but ultimately that their marriage was always itself all about acquisition.
The film then ends with a dying Douglas putting his hand on a dying Turner. We perceive this as an act of affection, but she clearly views it as an act of possession. Her dying act is to push him away, her body passing unclaimed.
7.9/10 – Good but too long. For a more intellectual take on this material, see Olivier Assayas' "Summer Hours". Worth two viewings.
D'Amato's tale is about acquisitions, possessions and the power of money, so the lawyer's early mentioning of cash is significant. In offering his advice for free, however, D'Amato sets himself up as being morally apart from the world he is about to describe. He is a voice of reason, or so he would like us to think.
D'Amato's tale? Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas play The Roses, a wealthy couple who first meet at an auction (this meeting place is fitting; the duo battle over objects from the onset). With marriage then comes riches, happiness, big houses, and many garish possessions, the film painting a now familiar Utopian image of late 1980s Reganism. When the passion of romance fades, however, the couple instigate a bitter, violent divorce. From here on, the film becomes a dark comedy, a demented version of "Citizen Kane", each self-obsessed partner blaming the other for their psychoses, and each becoming maddeningly preoccupied with acquisitions, possessions, inventories, objects and artifacts, to the complete exclusion of everything else. As the marriage crumbles, the couple become so obsessed with surfaces (the film takes place at "Christmas", man's festive ode to consumerism) that they conduct a literal, and quite violent, war in their own opulent mansion. Set in Washington DC (military-looking helicopters constantly fly over apocalyptic, DC skylines), the militaristic tone of the movie has obvious, larger ramifications. The capital of the United States is capital. Nothing else matters. Cue much violence and possessiveness, culminating, fittingly, in DeVito directing a biopic of trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa three years later.
It's a very good film, handsomely directed by DeVito, whose love for Hitchcock is apparent throughout. Douglas and Turner also do well, chewing scenery left, right and centre. Both have always been drawn to dark roles. Here they satirise their romantic unions in the "Romancing the Stone" movies, in which their both starred, and also a number of their previous films, in which Douglas is typically a yuppie careerist, a greedy scoundrel, a man who's consumed by dangerous women and exhibits drives toward power and success through money, while Turner is typically a femme-fatalle or marginalised woman driven to further exclusion. In "War of the Roses" the duo both play toward these now familiar roles, whilst also laying bare the crassness behind them. The shock of the movie is not that the Rose's rosy marriage fails, or even that the couple are willing to kill to keep their possessions, but ultimately that their marriage was always itself all about acquisition.
The film then ends with a dying Douglas putting his hand on a dying Turner. We perceive this as an act of affection, but she clearly views it as an act of possession. Her dying act is to push him away, her body passing unclaimed.
7.9/10 – Good but too long. For a more intellectual take on this material, see Olivier Assayas' "Summer Hours". Worth two viewings.