When the greatest compliment you can muster up about your partner is “He has arms”, then you know that somewhere along the way, the relationship may have taken a downturn. Such is the therapy session that we’re dunked into at the opening of The Roses – a romantic caper based on Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses, and starring Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch as a husband and wife whose pride, wrath and envy read like a potted seven deadly sins of marriage.
Cumberbatch’s Theo is a successful architect, his wife Ivy a budding chef who put her career on hold to raise their two children. When a freak storm hits their relocated home of Mendocino, California, destroying Theo’s latest masterwork whilst sending an unexpected crowd to Ivy’s failing hobbyist cafe We’ve Got Crabs, their lots in life are swiftly reversed. Neither, quelle surprise, deals with the change gracefully.
Tapping into a classic lineage that runs from Audrey Hepburn’s feisty old Hollywood romcoms to a Pinter-esque sense of seething, resentful domesticity, you can guess the vague outline of The Roses’ within its inaugural 10 minutes. Ingenuity is not the order of the day here, although the particularly sharp one-liners delivered by an always-excellent Colman and Cumberbatch - the increasingly exhausted foil to his wife’s rapidly-escalating star - are frequently laugh-out-loud funny.
The considerable talents of their proven ensemble cast, however, are largely wasted. Aside from Kate McInnon’s Amy, whose lusty scenes are the right level of ridiculous, Jamie Demetriou’s architect frenemy Rory is underused, while Ncuti Gatwa’s waiter Jeffrey barely has enough lines to establish a personality beyond ‘staff’.
Colman and Cumberbatch undoubtedly carry the whole film and do so well – albeit with a script designed to make both characters wholly dislikeable. Ivy is given the more unfairly damning judgement: a woman with the audacity to want to thrive at the expense of her husband. But you’ll not be wanting to invite either of the Roses to your dinner party.
In the collision of domesticity and career ambition, amped up here to cartoonish levels that become increasingly insane as time goes on, the questions they ask are valid: what do you do when you just run out of the desire to compromise? There’s enough ammunition in The Roses’ war to last a lifetime, but the result is more of a comfy Sunday sofa watch than must-see destination viewing.
In cinemas from August 29
