“The bleakest portrait of a marriage since Bergman”: The War of the Roses reviewed in 1989

Whereas Danny DeVito’s directorial debut, Throw Momma from the Train, was marred by a typically Hollywood streak of sogginess (happy endings all round, and Momma dying from natural causes), one can have no such complaint about his follow-up, The War of the Roses. The presence of the director and his two co-stars suggests a spin-off of Romancing the Stone, but instead results in what is probably the bleakest portrait of a marriage since the heyday of Ingmar Bergman. Some of the exchanges, especially in the earlier part of the film, ring particularly true to life: Oliver impatiently interrupting his wife’s anecdote at a dinner party, for example, or her flinching at his affected laughter.

Flying in the face of the current trend for ‘feelgood’ endings, the film sticks to its guns to the last, when the mortally wounded Oliver attempts to hold hands with his similarly injured wife – and she brushes him away; which is enough to make the ending of Duel in the Sun seem positively upbeat. The presentation is stylised; DeVito delights in setting his leading players off against each other by visual means as well as verbal – camera angles and tricks of proportion which make one loom larger than the other, for instance. The violence is largely of the Tom and Jerry bounce-back variety (the couple look in remarkably good shape for people who have been hurled on to a hard floor from a great height), but otherwise only two concessions appear to have been made to popular sentiment.

One is the framing device by which D’Amato (Danny DeVito) is seen to be telling the story; at the end he sends his prospective client packing with the unlawyerly advice that married couples should stick together through thick and thin – which gives the audience a chance to decide whether to view the entire saga as a tale which has either been inflated in the telling or made up from scratch. The other concession is a brief insert of Oliver’s dog to indicate that it hasn’t been made into pate after all (even though Oliver thinks it has): a regrettable failure of nerve, and rather unfair to the cat which has already been sacrificed to the wheels of Oliver’s Morgan. On the minus side as well is Marianne Sagebrecht’s housekeeper, a character so redundant that one can only assume that DeVito took advantage of the actress’ presence in the vicinity when filming began.

The film fairly summarises one of the shortcomings of modern marriage: all consuming aspiration towards a dream of achievement (nice income, nice house, nice children) coupled with flagrant neglect of the spiritual side of things and an obsession with petty point-scoring. Though it’s being presented as a black comedy, it isn’t particularly funny, and one might also carp that Oliver and Barbara are such unlikeable characters that one cares little about their descent, locked in mutual antagonism, into self-destruction, though it might well be the aforementioned spiritual lack which makes them seem so brittle and unpleasant in the first place. Whatever, it confirms DeVito as one of the few mainstream film-makers who are willing (and powerful enough) to take risks.