With the understanding that current filmmaking trends favour the nostalgia-infused sequels, prequels and reboots of beloved classics, there is still the occasional remake announcement that makes you go, “Huh?”
Such was my response to Jay Roach’s ‘The Roses’, a remake of the 1989 black comedy directed by Danny DeVito ‘The War of the Roses’. Revolving around an ambitious, materialistic married couple fighting over a gorgeous house to which they both feel solely entitled, the source material is an entertaining takedown of rabid Reagan-era capitalism.
To remake that story today, then, is to do so with far less sharp a bite. In the 1980s, it was very obvious who the rich were because they were still portrayed within a select band of society. Thus, it was more acerbic when films chose to pick on them, as this contained some vein of critical social commentary.
Today, however, rich folk are essentially the norm. Social media has made every wage bracket blindingly visible: lavish wealth is no longer garish and vulgar, but a staple of attention-seeking influencers.
Which means, it’s not very compelling a premise to depict a rich couple fighting over a nice house that isn’t really much nicer than any other apartment one would see in just about any Netflix series.
And so ‘The Roses’ sets off on uncertain footing. It is, technically, good. It is nicely photographed by Florian Hoffmeister – if a little unadventurously, given his icy work on 2022’s 'TÁR' – and the acting is also to a high standard.
The two eponymous Roses are played with much English sarcasm and pithiness by the likeable Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, who both serve as engaging protagonists. Many of the film’s biting retorts and glib comebacks are well serviced by their performances.
That overall quality of Englishness, however, is one of the film’s most distracting – and detracting – elements. Firstly, ‘The Roses’ is rather obviously shot in England, specifically the southwest county of Devon, where I happened to spend 18 years of my life. Which makes it rather hard to buy the film’s California setting – one shot even featuring a background vehicle with rather obvious UK registration plates.
Beyond that, a number of the film’s small cast are played by recognisable English television actors, here doing their damnedest to pass for Americans with somewhat one-dimensional accents and mannerisms. As such, the film has a pervasively English quality that plucks the thorns from the rose.
Even in their most ill-meaning exchanges, the dialogue between Colman and Cumberbatch reads as sarcastic more than spiteful. The harder cynicism of the 1980s original, and the electric performances of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, carried a far darker and more compelling vein of humour than this modern reimagining.
‘The Roses’ is unmistakably English in tone and location, lending it more the quality of a weeknight BBC comedy, which does little to aid the aggressively American source material.
