The War of the Roses (1989)
Directed by Danny DeVito
Barbara and Oliver Rose live happily as a married couple. When Barbara starts to wonder what life would be like without Oliver and likes what she sees, the two begin a campaign to force each other to leave their house, with their divorce lawyer D'Amato caught in the middle.
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What critics compared The War of the Roses to
And at this point, it'd be easy to call this a cop-out in terms of theme -- if this is a satirical black comedy about marital frustrations, it sure seems optmistic (unlike, say, The War of the Roses or even American Beauty, which lead themselves to destructive but effective conclusions).
Director Doug Liman, who showed a flair for combining action, drama, and metaphor in The Bourne Identity, cant find the note of irony that worked for Prizzis Honor and The War of the Roses, so he settles for the high-tech gimmickry of True Lies.
And then, in a quite violent about-face, we’re meant to find it humorous when they turn homicidal on each other (it’s not unheard of – Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses managed the trick quite nicely).
The ensuing battle of the A-list celebrities has some of the harshness of The War of the Roses in which Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner stuck it to one another with true venom.
From there, the film turns into a more action-filled, nastier but ultimately sexier spin on both "The War of the Roses" and "Prizzi's Honor."
That's where Mr. and Mrs. Smith finds its footing as an explosive, guns-blazing variation of The War of the Roses.
From her numerous kills throughout to a tremendously entertaining face-off against Hilary Swank that reminds of The War of the Roses (1989) even as it feels ultimately fresh, she is a force to be reckoned with.
Its dark themes—including a marriage battle that makes The War of the Roses seem like a tickle fight—could prove too heavy for some mystery fans, and the subversive handling of satirical elements might be mistaken for schlockiness.
Ostensibly a scathing examination of how a marriage can quickly devolve from wedded bliss to homicidal tendencies (“The War of the Roses” as scripted by Hannibal Lecter comes to mind), Fincher and Flynn manage to also work in an equally acidic satirisation of the frothing media frenzy that often gravitates to these sort of cases in real life, primarily via Missi Pyle as a cable news talking head in the Nancy Grace mold.
It makes “The War of the Roses” seem warm and fuzzy.
Gone Girl may come advertised as a thriller, but that’s Fincher being a trickster—he’s gone and made the curtest, nastiest, most acidic black comedy about the marital accord since The War of the Roses.
That the picture also happens to be the most diabolically entertaining black comedy since The War of the Roses is just the icing on the cake.
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There’s nothing particularly new within the canon of “broken relationship features” here ( Kramer vs. Kramer , The War of the Roses , and The Story of Us have all tackled the pain and sometimes absurd nature of divorce in their own manner) but writer/director Noah Baumbach ( The Squid and the Whale , Frances Ha ), bringing his staple brand of talky-intelligence and humour to proceedings, somehow exerts a sense of freshness.
Other American films about divorce (a mini-canon that includes Kramer vs. Kramer , Shoot the Moon and, yes, The War of the Roses ) have portrayed this phenomenon — the legal process driving and shaping the couple’s feelings rather than vice versa — but none with the force and clarity of this one.
Like The War of the Roses (1989), this movie is darkly funny so that we can laugh along at the rancid underbelly of America lest we succumb.
Douglas could be just as famous making the same post–Wall Street movies: Fatal Attraction, The War of the Roses, Basic Instinct, Falling Down, Disclosure, The Game, A Perfect Murder, Traffic.
What hurts is that it never takes off into the wild ozone (like, say, Throw Momma from the Train or The War of the Roses � Danny DeVito really should�ve directed this), nor is it grounded in much reality � it�s a middle-of-the-road farce, too timid to risk losing the audience by making the working lads cold-blooded either in murder or manipulation.
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He is fascinated by dark, twisted things, as one can tell from the movie he made immediately before The War of the Roses, Throw Momma from the Train, and from his 1996 adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda .
Consider that his previous directing credits include “Throw Momma From the Train” and “ The War of the Roses ,” and you sense that he has some kind of deep mordant fascination for dysfunctional families (the family life in his “ Hoffa ” was not exactly functional, either).
Throw Momma From the Train, The War of the Roses, and Hoffa rank among his best; Death to Smoochy and Envy ... ok, not so much.
The broad, in-your-face directing style (slightly modulated here) that DeVito used to wearying effect in his previous comedies -- "Throw Momma from the Train" and "The War of the Roses" -- turns out to be perfect for translating Dahl's grotesquerie to the screen.