This is going to sound weird or ridiculous, but a long while ago a friend observed once that some women seem to inflate like puff adders when angry. His girlfriend, he actually meant. When angry or seething she literally seemed to swell up, he said — her lips would tighten, neck would get slightly thicker, eyeballs would bulge. I’ve never noticed a woman become a puff adder, but maybe I have without actually saying to myself “wow, she’s inflating like a balloon.” I’ve never forgotten this description so there’s possibly as reason for that. On a subliminal level, I mean. Let’s broaden things out by including both genders. Has anyone ever noticed anyone — parent, girlfriend, boss, bartender, coworker — inflate like a puff adder when angry?

Like all rewarding, well-crafted dramas, Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife is a giver, not a taker. Set in the mid ’90s, it’s about a successful lifelong partnership, begun in the mid ’50s, in which the aging junior partner — Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), a Saul Bellow-like novelist — gets all the credit while the senior partner — his wife Joan (Glenn Close) — is repeatedly praised for being loyal and supportive.

Joan is a familiar, quintessential character — the discreet, classy, long-under-valued wife and partner of an ostensibly great man. The difference is that she’s fuming.

The story tension in The Wife is about Joan’s poise becoming more and more challenged when she, Joseph and their frustrated, pissed-off son, David (Max Irons) fly to Stockholm to accept the ultimate honor of Joseph’s professional life — the Nobel Prize for literature.

Runge’s film, based on a screenplay by Jane Anderson and based on Meg Woltizer‘s same-titled novel, is actually more of a suspenser than a marital drama. For it’s clear early on that Joan is Mount Vesuvius, and that it’s just a matter of time before Pompeii will be covered in volcanic ash.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that Joseph isn’t as gifted as the world believes, and that the Castleman clan wouldn’t be in Stockholm (or, for that matter, enjoying any kind of flush lifestyle) were it not for Joan’s writing acumen and in fact genius, particularly her skillful reassembling and upgrading of Joseph’s servicable but no-great-shakes prose.

For The Wife to work, you have to throw in with young Joan (Anne Starke) early on, and the likelihood (which she’s had explained to her by an older female author, played by Elizabeth McGovern) that her career as a gifted writer will never come to fruition, given the sexist, male-favoring mindset of the Eisenhower-era publishing industry.

As the film hops back and forth between the ’50s and the ’90s, you come to understand that Joan has accepted a frustrating deal in order to enjoy at least a measure of second-hand recognition and material payoff for her literary gifts. It’s a devil’s bargain that she’s found a way to live with, but when the Nobel people come calling, the veneer begins to fray.

If you ask me Close’s Wife performance is a crown jewel — her finest and hookiest since Fatal Attraction‘s Alex Forrest, which of course happened over three decades ago, and before that the motherly Jenny Fields in The World According to Garp (’82).

She’s been Best Actress-nominated six times (for these two plus her performances in The Big Chill, The Natural, Dangerous Liaisons, Albert Nobbs) and you’d better believe Close will be nominated for Joan Castleman also.

A couple of weeks ago I posted an HE-plus piece about one of the most moronic time-passage sequences in the history of motion pictures. It’s contained in Chris Weitz‘s New Moon, the second Twilight film. It proves one of two things: (a) the Twi-harders were either bone dumb or (b) the producers believed them to be.

New Moon contained an ambitious shot that tried to visually convey how completely Kristen Stewart‘s Bella had sunk into depression. Months and months of sitting in a stupor. The camera circled around her three times as she sat in her bedroom in front of a bay window that looked out on her front yard, and either you spotted what was happening or you didn’t.

Anyone with a reasonable number of brain cells would have noticed how the front yard changed from month to month. In the first shot a tree has brown leaves and kids on the street are wearing Halloween costumes. In the second the branches are bare and somebody’s raking leaves on the front lawn. In the third shot the lawn is covered with snow.

And yet Summit producers decided to place titles — OCTOBER, NOVEMBER, DECEMBER — over each camera pass so viewers wouldn’t be confused about the time-passage aspect. Presumably fans complained during test screenings that they couldn’t understand why leaves would fall of a tree so quickly or how there would suddenly be snow covering the front yard, etc.

I don’t believe Weitz decided to use the titles on his own. I’ll bet $100 he was forced into it.

Michael Bloomberg is a wise, crafty, highly intelligent politician and businessman. But if he runs as an independent in 2020 and the Democratic nominee is perceived as tired or a re-hash (i.e., not Beto), the liberal-progressive-centrist vote will be split and Trump will be re-elected. Honestly? As much as I love and admire Elizabeth Warren, Bloomberg would make for a stronger anti-Trump candidate.

An exclusive Peggy Siegal party for Julian Schnabel‘s Vincent Van Gogh film, At Eternity’s Gate (CBS Films, 11.16), happened today in the Hollywood hills.

The main honorees were director Julian Schnabel and the great Willem Dafoe, whose performance as the tortured and gifted Vincent Van Gogh is surely his finest since inhabiting Jesus of Nazareth 30 years ago in Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (’88). At the very least Dafoe (who was well on his way to a Best Supporting Actor win last year until Sam Rockwell stormed the Bastille) has to be Best Actor nominated…c’mon! This is great, primal, world-class channelling. Ask anyone.

(l. to r.) At Eternity’s Gate star and like Best Actor niminee Willem Dafoe, Al Pacino, director Julian Schnabel and co-screenwriter and co-editor Louise Kugelberg.

Tatyana Antropova, Guillermo del Toro.

Al Pacino, who arrived somewhat late.

San Fernando Valley view from the patio.

The fraternal, warm-hearted Guillermo del Toro conducted a q & a with Schnabel, Dafoe and co-screenwriter and co-editor Louise Kugelberg. Al Pacino (The Irishman) and Benicio del Toro were also in attendance.

Hollywood Elsewhere correspondent Tatyana Antropova, a longtime Van Gogh admirer who read Irving Stone‘s “Lust for Life” in her late teens, attended on my behalf.

HE review of The Other Side the Wind, posted on 9.19.18; my 9.29.18 review of Morgan Neville‘s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

I’m about to drive over to a friend’s place for a long-awaited viewing of WHE’s 4K Ultra HD Bluray of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The huge flatscreen and 4K Bluray player are top-of-the-line (i.e., my host is in “the business”) so whatever this disc has to offer, I’m not going to miss a single value or aspect. I’ll check back in later.

The gold-faced, green-tinted, thick-lipped fishbowl guy with plump, vaguely Eastern European features is directing all non-Republicans to abstain from voting on Tuesday. Especially those in Texas. Just go to work, focus on the chores at hand, ignore what’s going on, hit the market on your way home, keep to yourself and throw a few beers down before you crash. If you do this all will be well, and no one will throw you down a hole or insert an explosive brain-control device in the back of your neck. Read my reptilian pinchers — you know what not to do.

Originally posted on 7.7.13: L.M. Kit Carson‘s Direction Man, a five-minute short starring the immortal “Larry Williams,” played at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. I saw it at the Egyptian toward the end of the festival, and came to the immediate conclusion that it was one of the funniest found-footage shorts ever shot, made or shown.

Ignore the poor video quality — the material and personality are what count. All I know is that there’s very little likelihood of anyone running into a Larry Williams type of guy today with smartphone GPS and whatnot. In my mind Williams is a legend, a kind of genius, a jazzman. And nobody knows where he is today, or so I’ve been told.

It took forever to get hold of a VHS copy of Direction Man, but I succeeded in doing that today with the assistance of Chance Browne, the renowned cartoonist and musician who lives in Wilton, Connecticut, and particularly his wife Debbie. I gave Chance a copy sometime in late ’95 but then lost track of my own — thank God he held onto his.

Yesterday Hunter Tremayne posted the following Bohemian Rhapsody comment on HE: “Saw it tonight in Barcelona. Place was packed with families. Laughing, clapping, cheering, the works. People were singing Queen songs all the way to the metro.”

Right away I decided to catch it again, and soon after persuaded a couple of friends to come along. Around 6:50 pm I drove down to the local Wilton Bowtie Cinema to get seats, and the second I entered the lobby I saw Sophie Cabot Black, my ex-girlfriend from the mid ’70s. She was sitting on a bench and studying her phone, and didn’t see me at first.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

HE to Indiewire podcasters Eric Kohn, Anne Thompson: I’m listening to a Best Actress discussion on your latest Screen Talk podcast, and waiting for a mention of The Wife‘s Glenn Close, whom 22 out of 25 Gold Derby spitballers regard as a prime Best Actress contender and whom Deadline‘s Pete Hammond has predicted a nomination for.

Olivia Colman, Lady Gaga, Melissa McCarthy, Charlize Theron, Rosamund Pike and even Hereditary‘s Toni Collette are discussed, but not Close. And all I can say is “you guys are amazing.”

Is this because of Anne’s unfortunate opinion that The Wife is okay but not exceptional? But it is exceptional and actually rather riveting. It’s a “play,” yes, but a very well written and expertly performed one, with a nicely layered build-up to the big payoff at the end. It works, it delivers, it knocks people out.

And what about the metaphor of Close’s character — the brushed-aside but stronger, smarter and more talented wife who lets her husband have it at the end? It fits right into the zeitgeist in a certain sense (i.e., silver-haired women have had it up to here) and is hugely popular with the over-55 set. I’ve attended two screenings with a somewhat older industry crowd, and Close’s performance is a very big thing with them. The after-buzz was palpable both times, trust me, and you guys are ignoring this?

Don’t tell me you’re giving it the Indiewire brush-off because Sony Classics opened The Wife in August. That’s so shallow, so herd-mentality.

Look at this holiday-themed Starbucks cup. Those are flames. You can say “yes, the flames of a living-room fireplace as dad throws another log on and mom serves cups of egg nog.” But one could just as easily say these are the flames of hell. One could argue that flames are more commonly associated with the caverns of Hades than they are with the family hearth. If you were marketing vp for Starbucks would you have signed off on this? On some level the artist who composed this may have been channeling the social hate currents of the Trump era.