Last week I watched this really good movie called The Wife. It was very powerful. I first heard of it actually while watching a skit on Saturday Night Live that was poking fun at Steve Harvey’s show Family Feud. It was an Oscar Nominees edition, and the contestants were divided between long time actors and new actors. One of the actors was Glenn Close (played by Kate McKinnon) for her performance in The Wife. I was curious about the movie after watching that sketch, and honestly this movie was deep. It was really deep. It’s about this married couple named Joan and Joe Castleman, and they live a seemingly quiet and comfortable life in New England. But one morning Joe gets a call from the Nobel Prize committee telling him he is invited to the Nobel Prize Ceremony in Sweden because he won the prize for literature. The couple are excited, as they should be, but through the course of the film it is clear that there is a less innocent backstory that comes with Joe’s success. We find out that Joan wrote a lot of Joe’s work for him because at the time he was struggling to publish his own work and was jealous of Joan for being a good writer, so he made her write his work for him and he took credit for it all. Joan wants to leave her past behind, but a reporter named Nathaniel Bone insists on writing her biography revealing the truth, that Joe was an imposter and that Joan was the actual writer for all of his work.
Honestly as a writer who struggles with self-worth, it was painful to see both of these people struggle to feel confident in themselves as writers, especially Joan. I was watching this movie with a friend and she told me this movie reminded her of the movie Big Eyes, which is the true story about the artist Margaret Keene and how her husband, Walter, made money off of her work and took credit for it. It was a frightening portrayal of how power can go to people’s heads and how honesty and integrity often get compromised when really good work goes commercial. Margaret valued honesty and integrity, while Walter valued profit and greed. Margaret spent long, long hours in the studio by herself in uncomfortable conditions, and when she needed to take breaks, Walter, driven by the pursuit for wealth and fame, only made her work harder so that he could play the salesman and pretend he was the one doing all the work even though he was a total fraud for taking credit for Margaret’s work. I think the flashbacks in The Wife sat with me, because at the time Margaret was a young undergraduate English student at Smith College in 1958. She thought her professor, Joe Castleman, genuinely liked her work but in honesty he just wanted to sleep with her even when he was already married and with kids. When he gets fired from Smith for sexual misconduct, he blames his failure on Joan and gets upset when she tells him that a draft of a novel he wrote needs improvement. The movie clearly shows how deep down Joe struggles with self-worth and to make himself feel better he takes his anger at falling short on Joan, lashing out at her when she tells him that the characters in his writing fall flat and threatening to divorce her unless she tells him he is a good writer. He says if he doesn’t make it as a writer, he is going to have to go back to teaching as a professor at a “second-rate” school and making the brisket.
At the time female writers were not respected, and Joan finds this truth out right from the get-go when she meets Elaine Mozell, a writer who visits Smith to talk to the English students in Joe’s class. When Joan meets Elaine and asks her about what it will take to have a literary career, Elaine crushes her dreams with a bitter smile, telling her to not become a writer because men don’t care about women writers and that her work won’t get published. Of course, because she didn’t have any mentors who could encourage her to weather the ups and downs of a literary career, and because the few writers she did meet gave her soul-crushing advice, Joan blurts aloud to Joe after her gets angry with her feedback that she will never become a writer and will never be as good as him. She does this because she doesn’t want Joe to leave her, so as the movie flashes back to the present, I saw how she stayed trapped in this really toxic marriage for many years and was silent about it because she wanted to protect her privacy. I don’t blame her, because talking about the abuse one has dealt with for years in a relationship is never easy and Joan wanted to keep her private life out of the public eye. But Nathaniel doesn’t see it that way. He meets with Joan for coffee and tells her that he did a lot of digging and found her writing in the Smith College archives and tells her that she is a much better writer than Joe and that she shouldn’t let him get credit for it. However, Joan stands her ground and refuses to let Nathaniel publish it. Even when he tries to butter her up and flirt with her, she doesn’t let him and tells Nathaniel to be respectful of her boundaries and not go through with this biography. Even after Joe dies of a heart attack, Nathaniel approaches Joan on the flight back from Stockholm and while he expresses his condolences, she knows he hasn’t forgotten about wanting to write that biography about Joe, so she tells Nathaniel that if he writes anything slanderous about Joe she will sue him. David is confused as to why his mom won’t tell the truth about what happened, but Joan tells him that instead of letting someone leak information about her private life and her marriage to Joe, violating her privacy, she is going to tell David and his sister everything that happened when they get home.
Of course, during the course of the movie Nathaniel doesn’t take no for an answer, and finds another opportunity to make the story known. In a later scene, David, who is Joan and Joe’s son and a writer himself, has Joe read a story he has been working on. Early in the movie, when they are celebrating Joe’s success, David approaches his dad to ask him for feedback about the story he is working on. David wants approval, but Joe continuously avoids the subject because he doesn’t want to hurt David’s feelings. When he is finally honest with David about what he thinks of his writing, David is hurt. Joe thinks that David’s writing has too many tropes, but I think he is unaware that David’s story is very much in line with the real-life dynamics between his parents. Joe gets up and leaves after he and David argue, and David remains in the bar feeling hurt and resentful. Nathaniel Bone approaches David and while we don’t see the full dialogue, it is implied that Nathaniel is dishing out the dirt on David’s dad and his mistreatment of Joan and dishonesty with his writing. In another scene, David is in the limo with his mom and dad and again, when David tries to bring up the story he wrote and his aspirations as a writer, Joe shuts him down. Joan thinks Joe should give David some approval and at least acknowledge his son’s dreams of becoming an author, and tells Joe that everyone wants approval, including him, but Joe doesn’t listen to her and says that he thinks David needs to learn to grow up and that he won’t make it in the writing field if he wants praise and approval from people. However, as a young man, Joe wanted that same approval from his wife. He couldn’t stand to be told his writing wasn’t good enough, and I think because he was such a distinguished professor at Smith, which at the time was an Ivy League school, he felt that prestige and title defined his worth, so he could treat people however they wanted. Because he craved that approval, he got upset when he didn’t get it in the ways he wanted.
Honestly, I can kind of relate because looking back, I often based my self-worth on my achievements, whether academic, music, or writing. And when I got praise and approval I felt pretty good about myself, but when I was alone dealing with my failures or when I got a rejection email back from the orchestra I auditioned for, or when I didn’t get the approval I wanted as a writer or musician I got really upset and started to think less of myself. I think that’s why I feel fortunate to have a religion or spiritual practice to help me ground my self-worth into something other than my external achievements. I’m not saying I am above awards or praise, but through practicing Buddhism I have realized that my self-worth comes from within me, and that whether I experience successes or failures along the path of this career I can remember that I am enough. It is a daily practice for me to awaken to that self-worth but it has been an immensely rewarding process and I have grown so much from learning how to bounce back from failure, write in my authentic voice and make efforts in my writing and music regardless of whether people are watching. I’m still getting over the fear of failure and rejection and not getting approval because I think like Joan said, wanting approval is human. And Brene Brown said in a documentary called The Call to Courage, which I watched on Netflix last year, said that even when people think “Oh, I don’t care what others think,” it is easier said than done because we are hardwired to care what others think of us.
When Joe gets the approval he wants from winning the Nobel Prize, before he receives the award, Joan tells him to please not mention her in his acceptance speech. Joe thinks she should be thanked, but Joan doesn’t agree. However, he doesn’t listen and ends up thanking her in his acceptance speech. Joan is upset and leaves the ceremony, and Joe chases after her, asking her why she is leaving. In the car, Joe asks Joan why she is upset with him, and Joan tells him the truth about their marriage, remembering how he took credit for her work for so many years, as well as his numerous affairs with other women and his mistreatment of their son David. He angrily throws the Nobel Prize at her, acting as if she needs it more than he does if she is so angry at him, but she refuses to take it, and so he throws it out the window. The prize is returned back to them, but that scene really showed me how all this pain and resentment and anger built up in Joan and Joe’s lives and exploded at this moment. Earlier, David comes into the room smelling of weed, and Joan and Joe find out that David had been talking with Nathaniel and that Nathaniel told him about Joe taking credit for Joan’s writing during their marriage. David tells his parents how angry he is that they kept these truths from him as a child, and there is a flashback to where Joan and Joe are in their home office and Joan is sitting at a desk and writing the novel that Joe would later take all the credit for. When David asks what they are doing and why he doesn’t get to spend time with his mom, Joe picks him up and takes him out of the room, David yelling and calling for his mom and Joan looking with a pained expression, knowing how much control Joe is exerting over her life to the point where she can’t hang out with her son because she is doing his dad’s dirty work of writing a well-written novel, in her own voice, that Joe will take credit for.
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