To the Heart of ‘War of the Roses’

It’s called lightning in a bottle and Hollywood doesn’t capture it very often. It happened with “Fatal Attraction” two years ago, and with “Platoon” the year before that. And it’s happening right now with “The War of the Roses.” With no common themes, these movies--a psychological thriller, a war movie, and a black comedy--entered the American consciousness and stirred it up on opening day.

The success of these movies is not determined by gross receipts, though “War of the Roses” seems certain to join the other two on the hit list. What makes them special is the fact that they connect with mass audiences in ways that dominate peoples’ thoughts and conversations for days, weeks, even months after the credits have rolled.

Are they great movies? Critics disagree, and so do many of the viewers who hie to the nearest espresso bar (or Denny’s) to slug it out. “Platoon” did not resolve moral conflicts over America’s involvement in Vietnam, but it sure provided a rope for both sides to tug on. “Fatal Attraction” had no greater ambition than to entice viewers with a roller-coaster ride into murderous dementia; the film makers were as shocked as anyone when the film became the whip with which women lashed out at the double-standard and eventually put the one-night stand on probation.

“The War of the Roses,” which parodies the disintegration of the “perfect marriage,” has been provoking arguments ever since 20th Century Fox began screening it for press and industry audiences a month ago. This week, after more than two million paying customers got their first look at the movie, it has been the lunch-room subject of choice across the land.

Fox, which had launched the movie with trailers portraying “Roses” as some sort of domestic screwball comedy, has shifted its advertising campaign to exploit the darkly violent center that has propelled the debate over the movie. The new “Roses” trailer is a take-off on “The 12 Days of Christmas,” and the ad copy goes to the heart of things: “In ‘The War of the Roses,’ my true love gave to me . . . 12 traps a flying, lots of orchids dying, piles of statues breaking, all the walls a shaking, lots of flying chairs, tumbling down the stairs, five broken teeth, four fractured bones, three cracked ribs, two wrecked cars, and a pup-peeeyyy in a pate.”

One thing seems certain. The dialogue on “The War of the Roses” has just begun. Viewers will debate whether the film goes too far in its physical depiction of a marriage-gone-foul, and media pundits will debate whether the film’s power is due to the film makers’ craft and cunning, or simply to their timing.

In the following piece, Peter Rainer explains why a film that he doesn’t think works, works so well with audiences.

Three types of films generally fall into the Everybody’s-Talking-About- Them category. The first is the event movie: hyped jamborees like “Batman” or “Ghostbusters” or “Top Gun.” The second is the issue movie: controversial Op-Ed films like “Mississippi Burning” or “Do the Right Thing.”

Then there’s the close-to-home movie: films like “When Harry Met Sally,” “sex, lies and videotape” and, now, “The War of the Roses” that attempt to deal with the “real” concerns of their (mostly white middle-class) audience--namely, love, sex, marriage and divorce. Such films often function for their followers as big-screen group-therapy sessions. Audiences take these films personally; disagreements are taken personally, too. If you reject the film, it’s often taken to mean that you reject the person who loved it.

The impulse to see what everyone else is seeing is central to the success of many of these movies. People want to key into a communal experience. For even the occasional moviegoer, going to the films that everyone is talking about provides a convenient tribalism. Of course, this tribalism is to some extent rigged by the media-hype machine. Hits can be launched by saturation advertising. Bad films can be puffed into profit while good films, deprived of promotion, often fall posthaste into the video bin.

But on some level, all of the Everybody’s Talking About Them films strike a nerve in the audience--which is not to say that they are necessarily good films. One of the treacheries of movies is that they can break down our emotional defenses even if we reject them intellectually. I’m not sure I trust any liberal who doesn’t admit being charged up by “Dirty Harry.” Or any feminist who wasn’t hooked by “Fatal Attraction.” The visceral nature of film undercuts our neat formulations of how we live our lives and draws us into murkier terrain. The tribalism of the film experience at least brings a bit of light into the murk. A shared fear is a less lonely fear. When a film works for a vast audience, when it shakes up that audience, it’s often because it brings out into the open hopes and anxieties that are simmering in the culture.

A movie that everyone is talking about has its precursor in the culture itself. Its success confirms the fact that, off screen, people are already conversant with its themes. For example, the hip therapy-ese, the sexual approach/avoidance in “sex, lies and videotape” turned its audience on because, in a sense, the movie sounded like its audience. If movies are our national theater, then such a film gratified its viewers by making them players on its stage. The narcissism of the movie star becomes the narcissism of the moviegoer. You respond most to the celebration of your own image.

Which brings us back to “The War of the Roses,” a black comedy about a hellish divorce. It is not, I think, a very good film. But it’s the movie everybody is talking about right now, and it’s not difficult to understand why. Unlike some better movies, “The War of the Roses” has a real subject--the way love turns to hate--and it works it up in a way that’s far more spirited and knockabout than the usual teary-noble approach. The film’s escalating skirmishes “go too far”--and that’s the point. They carry out the audiences most bludgeoning revenge fantasies. (After the public screening I attended, couples eyed each other warily as they left the theater.)

“The War of the Roses,” which is directed by Danny DeVito, plugs into the downside of romance in much the same way that “Fatal Attraction” did. Even more so. “Fatal Attraction” starred Michael Douglas as a happily married lawyer whose fling with an emotionally isolated woman ends in Gothic horror. The film’s Gothic horror aspects put it over: It was old-time moralism tricked up in shiny new slasher-film duds.

“The War of the Roses” features Michael Douglas as a happily married lawyer, Oliver Rose, whose marriage to Kathleen Turner’s Barbara Rose turns out to be not so happy. Whereas “Fatal Attraction” thumped for the comforts of monogamous marriage, “The War of the Roses” says that even those comforts are a lie. The film offers the opportunity to let fly one’s worst suspicions about the impermanence of love. Its promotional campaign blares its intentions: “Once in a lifetime comes a motion picture that makes you feel like falling in love all over again” the ad line begins, followed by the kicker: “This is not that movie.” In fact, “The War of the Roses” sells cynicism as blithely as all those films that sell love. Its success indicates that audiences are primed for a comedy that confirms their own cynicism.

The success of many close-to-home movies is a function of the era in which they are made. “Annie Hall,” one of the key “communal” comedies of the ‘70s, unveiled Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer and Diane Keaton’s Annie, new-style romantic heroes with their anxieties bristling on the surface. The film incorporated the ditsiness of courtship into its romantic scenario in a way that audiences found startlingly up-to-date. “Annie Hall” was as much about the impermanence of love as “The War of the Roses,” but its cynicism was doused in an obsessive optimism. For Alvy and Annie, romantic love may have struck out, but the need for such love was never in question.

That need has been all but extinguished in “The War of the Roses.” Oliver and Barbara first meet while vacationing in Nantucket. (Naturally, the weather is stormy.) He’s a Harvard Law student; she’s a college gymnast. In the early years of their marriage, Oliver works his way up to partner in a prestigious Washington law firm while Barbara raises their two children and commandeers the remodeling of their imposing antique-stuffed suburban manse. That done, Barbara is free to survey the marriage, and she doesn’t like what she sees. She clicks off to the uncomprehending Oliver one night and never clicks back on. “Whenever I see you I just want to smash your face in,” she tells him, and the war is on. In the ensuing divorce, both claim the manse. When Barbara refuses Oliver’s $490,000 buyout offer, he counters by remaining in the house, divvying up the square footage in an increasingly nutso waiting game.

Since we never really glimpse what Barbara and Oliver once loved about each other, their split has no emotional power. If you take Barbara’s side, you’re supposed to recognize that Oliver is a workaholic who doesn’t really appreciate his wife’s sacrifices. If you take Oliver’s side, Barbara is some kind of ungrateful Gorgon. The lack of specificity in their break-up is a clue to the film’s mass appeal. It’s a generic split, and so audiences can project onto Oliver and Barbara’s situation their own checklist of dissatisfactions. The couple’s rancor has a loony, free-floating unreality, and yet there’s a mite of truth here: the film preys on our fear that, yes, lovers do indeed sometimes click off “for no reason.” The film uses its very lack of psychological depth as a taunt.

Sometimes a film can become a popular hit by venting worst-possible case prejudices. Movies don’t only deal in shared dreams; they also deal in shared evasions. Few contemporary films have dealt positively with the implications of a strong career woman trying to make a go of it in society. In Warren Adler’s 1981 novel on which “The War of the Roses” is based, Adler at least paid lip service to Barbara’s feminist stirrings. The movie is much more inequitable in its balancing act.

What comes across is a vast misogyny, and that, too, may be a key to the film’s appeal, just as it was in “Fatal Attraction.” “Fatal Attraction” began in opposition to Michael Douglas’ fling and then, by turning his lover into a monster, doubled back into an implicit attack on feminism.

The same mentality is at play in “The War of the Roses,” which doesn’t bother to make a convincing case for Barbara’s need to seek her freedom. She starts up her own successful catering business, but gets no real satisfaction from it. As Kathleen Turner plays her, Barbara doesn’t get much satisfaction from anything, not even vengeance. Her resistance to being a “traditional” woman isn’t dramatized; her love for her house isn’t either, despite the fact that the house is supposed to mean everything to her. (It’s her symbolic child; Oliver’s, too.) Barbara is zombified, witchy, while Douglas’ Oliver has the sodden, pasty look of someone whose sexual fires have been banked for too long. The film plugs into a widespread male fear: It’s the nightmare fantasy of a successful man who recognizes that, in allowing his wife to enjoy the luxuries his money provides while also allowing her to break the traditional wifely role model, he has created a monster.

Still, for women in the audience, there may be a charge in watching Barbara’s rampages. It may not matter that she’s a monster: if you can project yourself into her situation in general terms, ignoring the way the specific ways in which the film is skewed, then her monstrosities are righteous. Barbara is physically stronger than Oliver; she snares him in a leg-lock, socks him in the jaw, bites him in the groin. Oliver’s hatred for her is all balled up with lust; he still harbors fantasies of reconciliation. But Barbara is stone-cold throughout; she battens Oliver down every time.

If the misogyny in “The War of the Roses” strikes a popular chord, so too does its tactic of turning divorce battles into Gothic slapstick. The film’s hyperbolic style allows its grungier meanings to slip through the dragnet. In its depiction of Barbara, the film is saying that her feminist concerns are ultimately meaningless. Her resistance to being a traditional woman devolves into tribal warfare. The Rose’s predicament is turned into Strindberg Meets the Three Stooges.

The grotesqueness of the combat in “The War of the Roses” defines the film for our era just as readily as the delicate, neurotic parrying defined the romantic combat in “Annie Hall.” For this is an era in which divorce is publicly and messily displayed; divorce is the lifeblood of the trash media. And a movie that mimics that trashiness, that turns agony into show-biz, has every chance of being accepted by audiences already pounded into submission.