What’s with Jay Roach’s The Roses (opens in theatres, August 29), about a warring couple, that so naturally exposes the thorns?
A still from the satirical black comedy The Roses, starring Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch. Pic/Searchlight pictures
Symptomatically, how do you diagnose a friendship?
I have a theory. It’s when two people become naturally uninhibited — sometimes being their stupidest selves; such that, forget others watching, they can barely watch over themselves, in each other’s company.
That’s when you know, they’re truly friends. It’s a pivotal moment. You could know each other for years, and never reach this point. You could attain this level in no time, too.
It’s organic.
Technically, a modern marriage is meant to be friendship, first. If it emerges from love, that friendship exists from Day One.
If arranged, in a desi way, I guess, it develops, over time. Either way, how does this friendship, as against the other, on occasion, play out in public?
Surely, you’ve got unwittingly caught between a tense married couple, squabbling in the company of friends, relatives, even strangers (at a bar, restaurant, train, flight, etc).
It’s mildly disturbing to witness how their comfort at being uninhibited descends to casual pettiness, with familiarity breeding such contempt, that they go at each other, pulling out the most embarrassing details, wholly unmindful of who else is watching!
Especially with older married couples, you notice, this becomes a Tom & Jerry, Beavis & Butthead kinda daily, oral routine. Regardless of the others in the room.
No, you don’t avoid such couples (if they’re friends). You somehow search for comedy in that situation to lighten up the moment for all.
Such is how the honest and hilarious house-warming party sequence, much like the rest of the film, unravels in Jay Roach’s The Roses (opens in theatres, August 29).
In the sense that the mature, married couple in the movie — Benedict Cumberbatch, 49, and Olivia Colman, 51 — pull all stops to verbally push each other off the edge.
Friends in the swanky dining hall may have nowhere to look. They continue to separate banter from bitterness, bringing their own jokes to the table. Tough luck!
As expected from Roach (Austin Powers series, Meet the Parents), The Roses is an over-the-top kinda black comedy, or dramedy, as it were.
Although hardly as crazy a caricature of marriage spiralling outta control as The War of the Roses (1989) that it’s a remake of; adapted from a 1981, Warren Adler’s novel by the same name.
Enough water’s flown under the bridge to do with gender relations, indeed, marriage as an institution, since the 1980s to 2025.
What we observe in The Roses is the lead couple, foremost, dealing with reversal of traditional roles within marriage. Cumberbatch plays a top architect; Colman is an underrated chef. They have two kids.
As it turns out in the picture’s plot — one career takes off, and the other tanks, because of a tornado, over the same night.
As in, the architect loses his lifelong rep, because the storm destroys his brand-new fancy monument, while people discover the chef’s restaurant, because they had nowhere else to go.
And so, the wife goes, from a dead crab-joint, to hanging with David Chang, having Ian McKellen over as potential diner, The New York magazine photoshoot, a restaurant chain, James Beard Awards (Oscars of food industry)… The husband goes home to raise children.
Here’s something that won’t change about friendships; decades, notwithstanding. It’s usually shared among equals.
I know, equality is a mirage. And that psychology suggests, there’s inevitably a leader and follower. But I mean the perception of equality in our conscious minds.
Is it even humanly possible to resist deep envy, when the professional life of a spouse soars simultaneously as the other is forced to scrape six feet under? In The Roses, you can tell, the guy’s trying.
It doesn’t help, when both husband and wife appear “narcissists” with their “navel” as “centre of universe”. Do they love each other? They certainly deserve each other’s ego!
Also, friendship recedes, once you stop sharing. This middle-aged resentment, as old as A Star Is Born/Abhimaan, ought to be the opposite of romance.
What follows is a two-actor film that you’ll love, for both — in order to survive how deeply their characters hate (each other).
I’ve been finding Cumberbatch, under-appreciated; post his Cold War super spy film, The Courier (2020), hardly got the notice it deserved.
Frankly, I would’ve enjoyed The Roses all the more, if it wasn’t an outlandish comedy at all, but something more believable (that you regularly detect whiffs of, anyway).
Along the lines of, say, Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road (2008), Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019), Hagai Levi’s Scenes from a Marriage (2021)…
But then again, what’s humour, if not tragedy from the flip side; right? I had a minor blast flipping through both. There’s an obvious lament within The Roses.
Not that I hold strong opinions on marriage as an institution, let alone its breakdown; having been through neither, thus far.
It’s just amusing to me, when people ask, “Why’re you single?” Can’t recall asking a couple, “Why’re you married?” You can tell how marriage, for a family, is the first unit of society, raising the
subsequent generation.
The kids in The Roses are rightly happier for their parents separating. They can love both better. As for how the others in the film are carrying on for years? “Inertia,” says the lead couple’s friend.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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