It’s easy to forget just how consistently, bracingly nasty The War of the Roses is, thanks in great part to the extravagant, and festive, studio packaging it arrived in, unwrapped in cinemas 30 years ago this month. It was fast-paced, glossy, Christmassy and, deceptively, it starred one of the most beloved onscreen couples of the 80s: Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. Audiences were accustomed to seeing them bicker in the hit adventures Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile but their sparring was only ever of the screwball variety, a string of lighthearted quips signposting a Billy Ocean-soundtracked happy ending on the horizon.
At the end of the decade, they reunited to show us that happily ever afters are as fantastical as treasure maps and that early romance will more likely give way to seething resentment and sadistic violence. The film was a cruel R-rated footnote to their era of PG-13 flirting and it both shocked and compelled me as a child whose family was in the thick of a divorce at the same time. I didn’t see it upon release – I was five at the time – but as it tore its way to the small screen, it became an early object of obsession. Each rewatch was met with a certain amount of parental displeasure, an understandable concern that I would blur the lines between what happened on screen and what was happening in real life …
The War of the Roses unfolds as a cautionary tale, shared by the lawyer Gavin D’Amato (Danny DeVito, the reliable third wheel in Douglas and Turner’s previous two capers and also playing director here) with a client seeking a divorce. Urging him to consider his options, he tells the story of the Roses, a couple whose marital bliss ended in disaster. “They met … great. They agreed on that,” he says, while we’re taken back to a charming meet-cute as Barbara (Turner) and Oliver (Douglas) compete at an auction in Nantucket. The film leaps forward from the auction to the bedroom to their first apartment to their first house, the couple gliding from one rite of passage to the next, ticking every box that society has taught them to tick. Barbara becomes the perfect housewife, Oliver goes from associate to senior partner at his law firm and they have two cute kids, one boy and one girl.
“Everything was working for the Roses,” Gavin says. “Let me restate that. The Roses were working for everything.”
Because in Michael J Leeson’s exuberantly cynical script, based on the book by Warren Adler, hard work only gets you so far. The Roses were doing everything they thought they needed to do to be happy but it wasn’t enough. Those cute kids grow up to be overweight and insolent. That grandiose house ends up feeling empty and alienating. Their relationship goes from fun and frisky to stale and stuffy. The cracks that start to show are initially relatable – the annoying way your partner laughs, the rambling way they tell a story, the endless fucking snoring – and the escalation is believably restrained. For a while. But the potholes they encounter culminate in more of a sinkhole, those niggling issues no longer fixable with just a brave face.
Barbara asks for a divorce. Oliver says no. Barbara wants the house. So does Oliver. Both stand their ground, refusing to abandon their much-loved home, and the competitive edge that brought them together on that rainy Nantucket day soon becomes the same thing that starts tearing them apart. It’s the cruel irony of so many breakups and the film revels in this. As their beautiful house becomes a war zone, the ornament they playfully fought over years ago is brought back to be used as a cruel reminder of what they once had. It’s the last straw that forces them into their final physical duel, which leads to their deaths.
In this year’s wonderful, Oscar-tipped drama Marriage Story, Noah Baumbach similarly shows how divorce can bring out the worst in a couple, especially in one virtuosic show-stopping argument, but he also shows how humanity can still be maintained and, in a gut-wrenching final scene, how tenderness remains. In The War of the Roses, there’s no such relief. As the crumpled-up couple lie dying on a broken chandelier, one that’s crashed to the ground, Oliver reaches to touch Barbara, music swelling, but she pushes him off, a final, brutal rejection that remains one of the coldest endings I can remember in studio cinema.
Critics at the time were unsure what to make of it, unsure exactly how to enjoy watching a sprightly holiday comedy involving two big stars inflicting verbal and physical abuse on each other. In a mostly positive review, Roger Ebert nonetheless remarked: “There are times when its ferocity threatens to break through the boundaries of comedy – to become so unremitting we find we cannot laugh,” while Janet Maslin praised its “outstanding nastiness” but worried that the ending took things too far.
It was rare in 1989 and arguably rarer now to see a film of this scale have the courage of its convictions, maintaining its dour worldview right up until the bitter and bloody end. Dark studio comedies tend to end with light in fear of scaring off the wider crowd needed to justify a hefty budget, but global audiences embraced The War of the Roses in all its filthy glory. It was a box office smash, making $160m worldwide (with inflation, that number doubles). And what’s most revealing about its success is that it outgrossed both Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile, a happy ending for a film so keen to avoid one.
But for all its critical and commercial wins at the time, it has not had the afterlife one might expect. In the years since, its cultural impact has been surprisingly slight and despite talk of adapting Adler’s rather mediocre follow-up novel, The Children of the Roses, it’s the rare 80s hit not to receive a sequel, remake or reboot – a blessing, I’d argue. Its DNA can be felt, though, mostly in Gillian Flynn’s cynical marital thriller Gone Girl and its faithful big-screen adaptation, with the author herself naming Adler’s source novel as one of her favourites. What’s fascinating, on my umpteenth rewatch this year, is just how cruel it still is, 30 years on, at a time when it’s much harder to shock. It’s less the behaviour of the couple and more how it found its way into a film of this scale and gloss, uncensored, played for laughs.
As a child, I think I found something cathartic in its garish excess. It gave me the chance to laugh at a situation that was humourless in real life. As an adult, I’m far removed from that experience, of witnessing my parents divorce, but closer to my own romantic history and there’s something similarly fulfilling about witnessing the fall of the Roses. They act in ways that I would never but their relentless spite, right up until the finale, is oddly satisfying, a dogged commitment to not forgiving, forgetting or pretending that wounds have healed.
It’s an untamed assault, a frantic, shameless race to, as Oliver puts it, “the deepest layer of prehistoric frog shit at the bottom of a New Jersey scum swamp” and, ultimately, a horribly convincing argument against matrimony. I remain unmarried.
