The Roses (2025 | USA | 105 minutes | Jay Roach)
In 1989, Danny Devito re-teamed with frequent collaborators Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, directing a pitch black divorce comedy about a couple whose affections had turned poisonous, finding them waging outright war on each other for possession of a beloved home. This year, comedian Jay Roach tries his hand at the same material, pitting Benedict Cumberbatch against Olivia Colman, bringing dry British sensibilities to true love gone terribly wrong. Updating the novel to the present day brings its share of good laughs, but in its translation to modern therapy culture, far too many thorns are stripped from the stem.
The film cold opens in a couples therapy session in which the warring couple eviscerate each other with insults in what was meant to be an exercise to repair the foundations of their crumbling marriage, it’s pointed and hilarious and gives the sense that the movie might go for it in terms of comedic cruelty. The way that Cumberbatch and Colman relish the warfare speaks to each of their capacity for charisma that escapes any dry affect. But they almost seem to love tormenting each other too much to hate each other and the story immediately flashes back to their first meeting a decade earlier in jolly old London Town. He’s an aggrieved architect disappointed that his genius is going unrecognized; she’s a sous chef whose ideas about molecular gastronomy aren’t being properly appreciated. They consummate their fiery attractions in a freezer room and resolve to intertwine their ambitions and futures in the promise of America.
There, we skip forward yet again to find Theo (Cumberbatch) on the precipice of architectural success with he launch of a daringly designed marine heritage museum in Mendocino. Ivy (Colman) has settled into full time motherhood, albeit one that involves making exquisitely intricate desserts for their children, despite Theo’s disdain for over-saturating them with sugary sweets. Clearly, the new world has rewarded them handsomely, as he’s able to surprise her with a restaurant and support the endeavor with staffing and no discernible customer base. It’s a seemingly perfect balance of egos, that goes well enough until a freak storm (and the film’s grave misunderstanding of California’s regulatory climate) reverses their fortunes.
Thus, the great conflict at the heart of their marriage is a shift in the balance of success. His career washes out to sea; her’s skyrockets to the moon. She throws herself into a growing restaurant empire; he bizarrely focuses all of his attentions into turning their children into elite athletes. It doesn’t make much sense to the audience; so it’s easy to see how this turn becomes a point of frustration to Ivy. Seemingly afraid to push too much tension between the couple, Roach introduces a coterie of friends that both Theo and Ivy don’t really like, but who exist mainly to put some awkward levity into their interactions. Andy Samberg as a perpetually depressed lawyer and his wife Kate McKinnon as his perpetually horny (for both Ivy and Theo) wife. Zoë Chao and Jamie Demetriou are even less defined as the third couple, their main characteristic being skepticism of Theo and odd outbursts at dinners. Oh, and of course the Americans love guns. They’re funny, but it feels like someone smashed a panic button and inserted the comedians into the film after the fact to punch up the laugh lines.
The setup is there and the shift of the battleground to perspectives on child rearing and coping with different levels of success within a partnership is a smart innovation. But the terms of combat are wrong footed from the very start. While Cumberbatch is great at egotistical seething an self-righteousness, Colman is simply too warm a personality for the marital sparring to be on equal footing from an audience perspective. Even when she’s careless, it comes across as so justified and good humored that it’s impossible not to take her side. Even when she’s petty about splitting up possessions, she never feels at all to blame. (The film instead relies on Allison Janney as a cutthroat lawyer to bring any real swordplay in the sparring department).
Scene by scene, the movie has its entertaining moments — the influencer audience I saw it with ate up the jokes and barbs at modern life — but it never seems fully convinced in Theo and Ivy’s hatred for each other. Every time you feel the actors trying to ramp up for a blowout, the warmth of Cumberbatch and Colman’s personalities pulls us back from the bring, seemingly determined to convince us that deep down, both spouses still are good people who love each other. This is nice in terms of making the characters identifiable, but makes the build-up to an all out war less than credible or satisfying. There’s a softness to the film’s commitment to true depths of dark comedy that Roach moves the kids out of the house before things go to hell and, in a final nod to modernity, even relies on an AI home automation system to deliver the film’s final blow. It’s an entertaining night at the movies — or one that in the days of video rental stores my mom would pick up simply because it has “so many good people” — but doesn’t have quite enough bite. Maybe the eighties were better after all?
The Roses arrives in theaters on August 29th
Image courtesy Searchlight Pictures.