The Roses is a perfectly terrifying takedown of love | CBC News

“The work goes on!” chant two towheaded ten-year-olds, testing out their new mantra while transitioning from yet another 10K into even more windsprints. 

Of course this is strange not only for the fact that their self-improvement obsessed father, Theo Rose (Benedict Cumberbatch), is standing behind them grinning maniacally with a stopwatch but also since not 20 minutes ago — at least measured by The Roses’ actual runtime — they were hunched over a bowl of ultra-processed peanut butter. A bowl then promptly vomited into, thanks to a sugar hangover championed by their chef mother Ivy Rose (Olivia Colman). 

But namely, it is strange for the fact that their shifting allegiance from dessert to exercise fanaticism is not a comment on addiction substitution, the mercurial passions of youth — or even a creeping American health epidemic. 

Strange because these adorable avatars of their parents are just that: set pieces representing the way the chips in a marriage can abruptly transfer from one party to another. Dimpled manifestations of the fact that, no matter how hard they try to pretend they’re not, each partner is always measuring the size of the other’s pile.

“You stole my children from me,” Ivy chokes out to Theo at one point later on in The Roses, a film that ostensibly documents a marriage from rose-coloured meet-cute to lawyer-attended meetings. 

It’s absurd, and it’s supposed to be. The Roses, on its surface, is a comedy after all, and even in the moment Ivy knows how disingenuous her complaint is; “stealing” her children amounts to Theo teaching those kids to no longer stuff their faces with her endless confectionaries — physical representations of not just her love but her ownership over their still-evolving ideals. Instead, her kids now spend their time going on runs and counting calories and generally adopting hobbies in which Ivy can neither participate nor see herself reflected.

WATCH | The Roses trailer:

Unfair though they are, these are the first honest words she’s spoken to Theo in a long time. And it’s not like Theo has been particularly fair either: an in-demand architect who was happy to see Ivy remain a stay-at-home-mom for over a decade, he utterly fell apart when they had to swap roles. 

Because as the intended side-project restaurant We’ve Got Crabs (get it?) Theo bought his wife suddenly became a nationwide franchise, he discovered he was not as altruistic as he’d thought. And as his own career imploded in a spectacular and very public fashion, a bitter truth began to eat at his soul: He was only okay with having a wife as long as that woman acted as a therapist, a nanny and — most importantly — a second fiddle. 

“I do need it,” he even admits, tearfully, to Ivy, after she accuses him of not needing a life partner but a human sponge. Of needing Ivy to prop him up, of his view of passionate love being the sinews and tendons holding together the actual meat of a marriage: comfort, consolation and uncritical, pitying commiseration. 

This is the other of The Roses’ great magic tricks: of working down into the depths of marriage to reveal a dark and almost hopeless motivation at its core. But doing it in a way that also brings on the laughs.   

It’s evident as Cumberbatch and Colman deliver cutting, withering barbs about one another that provoke giggles from themselves — and expressions of horror from their couples’ therapist. Or finally revealing the truth of their struggling marriage to their kids, who only smile in congratulations and encourage them to finally separate. Or at a truly chaos-infused dinner party that at one end of the table sees a couple try their very best to make their partner cry. And on the other has a different couple toss out jokes about each other’s malfunctioning genitalia. 

The Roses is a deeply funny movie — far more light than the squeamishly dour film it’s remaking. But beneath the jokes and crab-based puns lies the answer as to why one might risk marriage in an era of skyrocketing divorce rates. That hell might be other people, but we still don’t like being cold. So instead of being alone, we just grin through those flashes of blinding hatred — ones both Theo and Ivy admit they feel for one another. They simply pretend they don’t. 

That’s because there is no such thing as a perfect relationship, they learn. As the other couples at their dinner parties and housewarmings teach them — particularly Andy Samberg’s Barry and his hyper-sexual, open-campaigner-for adultery wife, Amy, (Kate McKinnon). There are just varying degrees of resentment.  

Of course this is not the first film to plumb the depths of love turned cold. The Squid and the Whale‘s 2005 autopsy of a family seemingly formed from the primordial ooze of resentment rang true enough to launch writer/director Noah Bambauch’s career. It seemingly offered so much fodder for exploration, it led him to subsequently return to the exact same well 14 years later — outlining an examination of a seemingly universal experience within an almost painfully ironic title: Marriage Story. 

Further back still, 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer won the Oscar for best picture by charting the curdle of love into hatred. And exactly 10 years later, Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses — on which The Roses is based — told the story of a sociopathic narcissist driven to murder by a wife he bitterly hated but refused to allow to leave. 

“There are two dilemmas that rattle the human skull,” director/narrator DeVito delivered in that black comedy. “How do you hang on to someone that won’t stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won’t go?”

Materialists to Together

Thankfully for The Roses, that’s not the question the current doomerist romantic zeitgeist seems to be unpacking. Instead, there’s a more hopeful — if just as pessimistic — idea running through our movies. From Celine Song’s Materialists pitching modern love as a business equation, to Together pairing real-life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie to depict marriage as a Cronenberg body horror, modern day “roms” have more and more been ditching the lighthearted “com” aspect. 

You can even see it in gory smash hit Weapons — if you can squint through all the viscera. We’re not telling “Take my wife, please!” jokes anymore. Now it’s that we know love ends in pain, misery and (sometimes) bloodshed. But with how terrifying the world is anyway, that’s still a better deal than the alternative. 

That comes through in The Roses‘ changes to the original: now it’s Theo who’s designed a house he desperately wants to keep and Ivy whose breadwinning success keeps her from her family — one she still genuinely seems to love. The flaws are more evenly spread, and neither are the actual bad guy.

That’s because both want the same thing. They both desperately want to hold onto the other, but both recognize a marriage, generally, is not a thing that works.

“I didn’t want you to ruin it,” Theo tells Ivy at one point, when she asks why he didn’t even mention he had spent the morning saving a beached whale. It’s clear the admission hurts her: that her husband experienced one of the most transcendent moments of his life and hid it from her assumed mocking.

Even still, that doesn’t mean either one is ready to move out of course. The work goes on.