The Wife

I'm a therapist and, while this was attention-getting, it just doesn't wash. Predictability (the drug-user, the most disturbed-seeming character ending up the most poignant, too much to drink) and lots of gratuitous histrionics; characterizations are not built slowly, they are alternately slapped together and then dismantled. Noonan is unfair to his other characters; he's obviously written "Jack" as the only seriously charismatic (although seriously flawed) personage in the screenplay. Why dare to update "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and only do it halfway?

This is the type of movie that is not for everyone. In fact, most people would not like it at all. It is over an hour and a half of talking heads. Yes, the dreaded "stage play on film" which critics seems to hate. For me, it was one of the best movies I have seen in a long time and makes mytop ten list. It has been compared to "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" but I think that does not do it justice. Yes, the movie is about two couples and there is a lot of angst however in Woolf the maliciousness is obvious, loud and in your face. In Wife, the angst is subtle, quiet and cerebral. Tom Noonan is so brilliant and it is a crying shame that he does not have more work out there for us to enjoy. Does he need money or what? Every week another heist movie or mafia movie hits the big screen but jewels like this are on the verge of extinction. If you like Wife, be sure and check out Noonan's "What Happened Was...".

This is one of those movies that takes on a difficult subject and looks at it a thousand different ways. In any other hands than Tom Noonan's it would have been as hypocritical and as shallow as its subjects (Woody Allen would have filled it with celebrities & predictable one-liners).

Loved it! A 10 as far as I'm concerned. I'm critical by nature and I think this movie was perfect. I hope to find it in a video store so my wife can see it too. Complex, real dialogue. Shows real insight. A lot of talk and never a dull or false moment. Nothing mundane about it. I'm sorry he hasn't received the praise he deserves for the incredible stuff he is writing and directing.

A rare play that deserves to be a movie, Tom Noonan plays a New Age healer with marital troubles when one of he and his wife's (Julie Hagerty) patients, played by Wallace Shawn, decides to stop by their house in the woods with his wife, played by Karen Young. The cast is brilliantly effective, and we're never sure exactly who is controlling the evening. Noonan is creepily menacing, and the way he uses the camera for close-ups on actors' faces -- sometimes shown by reflections on winne bottles -- is excellent. There are some cliched parts in the movie -- reflections and mirrors, cheating spouses, drug use, and a night of drinking at a "dinner party" -- but nothing in the film is conventional. This is one of the best movies of 1995. 9/10