{"id":31857,"date":"2025-08-30T00:16:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T00:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/31857\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T00:16:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T00:16:08","slug":"the-2025-remake-is-missing-something-crucial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/31857\/","title":{"rendered":"The 2025 remake is missing something crucial."},"content":{"rendered":"

This article contains spoilers for all three versions of The War of the Roses.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a New York Times review<\/a> of Warren Adler\u2019s 1981 novel The War of the Roses, novelist Avery Corman argued that the book\u2019s main characters, Jonathan and Barbara Rose, are so awful they are\u2014to put it in modern parlance\u2014unrelatable<\/a>. \u201cWhy should we care about the Roses? Their actions are so special, they are both so cruel to each other, to their children, we start to back away from them,\u201d Corman, himself the author of Kramer vs. Kramer, the 1977 novel about another divorcing couple, wrote. \u201cThe War of the Roses, which began with universals, turns into a novel only about the Roses, about two driven, immature people.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true\u2014The War of the Roses, which has now been reissued <\/a>on the occasion of Jay Roach\u2019s new movie adaptation, The Roses, is never sad, never sweet. It\u2019s a domestic horror show, channeling the rancorous spirit of the 1970s, when second-wave feminism\u2019s critiques of heterosexual partnership sparked epic culture wars over marriage. Most other reviews of the book embraced the novel\u2019s spirit, and Danny DeVito\u2019s 1989 film adaptation, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, offered almost as much claustrophobia and cruelty as the novel. Audiences at the time seemed to like that\u2014DeVito\u2019s film grossed $178\u00a0million<\/a> stateside.<\/p>\n

The 2025 adaptation, opening this weekend and apparently trying for something a bit more palatable, adjusts the Roses back toward the universal. In casting Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as the divorcing couple, Roach has made the whole thing much easier to watch. Almost too easy: The two have a palpable chemistry that makes every little fight seem as if it will surely be resolved in the next scene. (And often it is.)<\/p>\n

The Rose marriage\u2019s new trajectory is fundamentally different\u2014an adjustment that nods to changing times but saps the conflict of its force, making it confusing to parse. In the Adler novel, and the DeVito adaptation, Barbara is a stay-at-home mom who supported Jonathan while he became a highly paid lawyer. Then, in the year their twins are applying to college, she starts to do some catering, which gives her that bit of self-confidence she needs to realize that her husband truly is an unctuous prick (picture, well, Michael Douglas, fresh off his Oscar for playing Wall Street<\/a>\u2019s Gordon Gekko\u2014that was good casting) and she could leave him if she wanted.<\/p>\n

In the 2025 movie, Theo and Ivy are both well-paid creatives\u2014he\u2019s an architect, and she\u2019s a cook\u2014who are supportive of each other\u2019s vision and drive. She takes time off when the kids are little, then they crisscross, as his career craters and hers takes off. They bicker over who will step back from a job to handle the family, but that problem is fundamentally solved by the early departure of their 13-year-old twins to boarding school. The story becomes a more modern one, but it loses the easily parsable conflict between breadwinner and homemaker that gave The War of the Roses its engine.<\/p>\n

The midcentury names Barbara and Jonathan are gone, in favor of Theo and Ivy; these two could just insert an ampersand and start a neutral-colors baby-clothes brand. The new Roses are British expats, living in California and moving from one nice house to another, nicer one, rather than two Americans who are working-class (Barbara) and upper-middle-class (Jonathan), ascending together to a beautiful home in Washington\u2019s exclusive Kalorama neighborhood, full of meticulously selected antiques. The little gestures toward class conflict in Adler\u2019s novel and DeVito\u2019s adaptation\u2014Jonathan corrects Barbara\u2019s pronunciation in public and, in a genius addition to the story by DeVito\u2019s movie, censures her for feeding the children too much sugar\u2014get flattened out, bringing the Roses closer together, making their conflicts look more like a product of the narcissism of small differences.<\/p>\n

Ivy and Theo fight about taste, just a little. Theo doesn\u2019t like Ivy\u2019s idea to put an antique stove into his much more modern design, and Ivy bristles at the expensive Irish moss Theo orders for the new house\u2019s roof, because it\u2019s got such a particular color green. And Ivy is the one who wants to feed the kids dessert, while Theo, when he takes over their upbringing, turns them into little athletes, fixated on rep counts and blood-sugar regulation. But these feel like minor vestiges of the original versions of the story, which was as much about the toxicity of upward mobility as about love, marriage, and divorce.<\/p>\n

The script of The Roses, written by Tony McNamara, takes the part of the novel where the couple destroys their perfect house, committing various assaults on each other in the process\u2014a highly imaginative tale of destruction that comprises most of the book\u2019s plot\u2014and stuffs it all into the climactic final 15 minutes of the film. In the theater, I kept looking down at my watch, wondering when the smashing was going to begin.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s Roses kill each other\u2019s pets. (DeVito bravely included a scene<\/a> in his adaptation in which Barbara feeds her husband p\u00e2t\u00e9 that\u2019s made of meat from his dog. \u201cWoof,\u201d Kathleen Turner says, flatly, at the reveal.) Jonathan has sex with the au pair; Barbara locks him in the sauna and turns it up. Jonathan empties out Barbara\u2019s Valium capsules and puts Dexedrine in them; Barbara doses Jonathan\u2019s orange juice with LSD. Jonathan ruins a dinner party Barbara is catering by booby-trapping the kitchen.<\/p>\n

Adler goes on and on, creating a mood in the house that\u2019s so suffocating and macabre that, by the end you\u2019re absolutely dying to get out. Home Alone wishes. And The Roses definitely wishes. Colman and Cumberbatch are game, crashing a chandelier, ruining one another\u2019s careers via A.I.-generated video, and locking each other in a room while polka music plays, but zero pets are harmed\u2014a little thing, maybe, but a barometer for just how unlikable this movie is willing to let its characters become (not very).<\/p>\n

Corman dinged the novel for focusing the Roses\u2019 conflicts on stuff. \u201cFor the Roses\u00a0\u2026 the house, the possessions, the antiques become even more important than their children,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe question for Jonathan and Barbara Rose is who will get custody of the things?\u201d This reviewer was a man who wrote a novel about a battle over child custody, one that was probably the most iconic popular novel about divorce immediately preceding The War of the Roses\u2019 publication, so it makes some sense he\u2019d get stuck on this.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Haley Swenson
\n American Women Aren\u2019t Too Happy. I\u2019m Just Not Convinced Marriage Is the Answer.
\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

But the whole point of putting the original Roses in that Kalorama mansion, full of antiques that they start accumulating the very day they meet, was to poke at this kind of person, who thinks \u201conly things increase in value,\u201d as Jonathan says to Barbara at one point. \u201cPeople diminish.\u201d<\/p>\n

The antiques that the novel\u2019s Roses purchase\u2014Staffordshire figurines, sleigh beds, Tiffany lamps\u2014are not just valuable in terms of money. They are Jonathan\u2019s bids toward a type of immortality\u2014Jonathan, burrowing into the upper class. That\u2019s why Barbara can\u2019t let him have them. She hates his pathetic social climbing and can\u2019t abide the idea that he would get away with that unscathed. That\u2019s why the scene in DeVito\u2019s adaptation in which Turner smashes his Staffordshires is so satisfying.<\/p>\n

Antiques like the ones that stuffed the Roses\u2019 original house have been losing value in the real world since about the turn <\/a>of the 21st century, so an update to The War of the Roses has to look different. The new movie\u2019s cliff house, filled with stylish modern furniture and sporting a whole-house digital assistant the Roses (of course) nickname \u201cHal,\u201d symbolizes a type of California creative-class wealth that bends toward the artisanal and organic. These Roses are not scheming to get into the upper class. They\u2019re people who spend tremendous amounts of money to see the ocean from every room, but they seem to be doing it only to help their own careers. This is a different kind of American rich person, and one that is also interesting to satirize. But The Roses doesn\u2019t have the meanness required to twist the knife.<\/p>\n

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    The changes to the ending show how defanged this story has been by these adjustments to modernity. Adler\u2019s couple dies after weeks of battle, locked in their boarded-up house, sweating, sick, poisoned, trapped with the debris of their storybook marriage. DeVito\u2019s adaptation streamlines their descent but still leaves the couple dead in their entry hall, after falling from their chandelier. The husband wordlessly seeks forgiveness, creeping a hand toward his wife, and in her last act, Barbara rejects it. In The Roses, instead, the couple has reached a cuddly rapprochement, until they ask Hal to light a fire, not knowing that ever since Theo bashed up Ivy\u2019s stove during the fight, gas has been leaking into the house. The screen turns totally white, and the title card reappears. Rest in peace to the Roses, and that gorgeous house.<\/p>\n

    Adler, who died in 2019 at age 91, was married for 67 years<\/a>\u2014by all accounts, happily. He got the idea for The War of the Roses from observing a divorcing couple in his social circle. This new film seems unlikely to capture the marital zeitgeist the way the novel did. Maybe the phenomenon of easily available divorce was all just too new, at the time. Since then, it\u2019s been drained of its bite by the same dispersal of culture that\u2019s made everything that was once monocultural seem less important. Now we have Liars<\/a>, Marriage Story<\/a>, online discourse about leaked Steven Crowder home surveillance videos<\/a>, our very own divorce column<\/a>\u2014lots of ways to talk about why couples split. Do we need The Roses? Sadly, I don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

    Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article contains spoilers for all three versions of The War of the Roses. In a New York…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[359,1380,25013,4141,18,117,19,17,2955,327],"class_list":{"0":"post-31857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-comedy","10":"tag-dating-and-relationships","11":"tag-divorce","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-marriage","17":"tag-movies"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}