Life seems easy for picture-perfect couple Ivy and Theo: successful careers, a loving marriage, great kids. But beneath the façade of their supposed ideal life, a storm is brewing – as Theo's ca...
WHAT I LIKED: Jay Roach's 'The Roses,' is about a couple who fall in love but then grow to despise each other.
Tony McNamara's script sometimes does a good job of milking the odd bit of amusing comedy from that with its acerbic, argumentative dialogue. Plus, there are a few genuinely compelling moments of tension during some particularly uncomfortable scenes where the couple battle in front of their house guests.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: Unfortunately though, there are two hugely fundamental flaws with the script that stop the film dead in its tracks.
Firstly, both of the characters are intensely dislikeable from the start, so you don't really care what happens to them. Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) is an insufferable architect who designs this catastrophically pretentious building, but then it collapses, so he spends the rest of the film as a stay at home Dad whining that he never got to fulfill his dreams. And then there's Ivy (Olivia Colman) who suddenly makes it big as a chef and spends her time complaining that she can't spend time with her kids because she's so busy jetting around the world and dining with minor celebrities.
Having unlikeable characters wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the film then did something interesting with them, but the other catastrophic flaw is that most of its time is devoted to making jokes from their horrible behaviours.
Theo basically abuses his kids by turning them into these obedient, exercise-obsessed robots, Ivy accidentally gives magic mushrooms to a bunch of customers at her restaurant because she's a bit stressed out, and the couple end up doing increasingly nasty things to each other; getting drunk on their own, battling over finishes in their new-build house, defaming their characters constantly, and even descending into physical abuse by the end. It's pretty dark stuff if you break it down, and it could have been a very different affair if the film had fully embraced that, but instead it's clear from the way everything is delivered - with its jukebox soundtrack, smiley delivery, clunky dialogue and insipid cinematography - that we're supposed to be finding it funny in a kind of smirky, light-hearted way.
Being expected to laugh at two hateful characters who lack any empathy will turn you off the film pretty quickly, so when they accidentally kill each other at the end, it'll just feel like a big relief.
VERDICT: 'The Roses,' is about two hateful characters doing hateful things, but because we're expected to laugh at that, the film ends up a complete misfire.
