The Roses exists largely as an excuse for an ensemble of the UK’s most talented actors to try out their American accents and recite some of the most vile, verbose monologues of the year. The screenwriter for this not-quite-reboot, Tony McNamara (The Rage in Placid Lake, The Favourite, Cruella, The Great, Poor Things) is a master of the quick, witty, verbal assassination, comedy of manners, subversive, sexual, and silver-tongued, and in many ways despite the fact that the movie serves up most of itself in the trailer and shoehorns its ending, the script still elevates it into an entertaining, unpredictable romp.
In this article, weirdly about Kate McKinnon’s tongue more than it is about the movie, McNamara talks about the process of reviving this story from the 1989 dark comedy directed by Danny DeVito:
“There was the idea of remaking this, but no one really wanted to remake the movie because it’s such a great movie,” McNamara recently told Entertainment Weekly. “I had read the book as well, and so I was like, ‘I don’t want to remake it, but I would love to write a movie about a marriage rather than a divorce — and a more contemporary version of what is a marriage now.”
The screenwriter pondered, “What if you’re watching two people who desperately want to stay married and can’t work out how to do it? … That would be a different kind of movie. That was the impetus to reimagine that story.”
The updates for 2025 are notable: McNamara has set himself a challenge by ruling out two common fonts of conflict for married couples in movies, parenting and sexual indiscretions. (Spoilers) Benedick Cumberbatch is preternaturally well-suited to whip his teenagers into shape once he adopts the major parenting duties of the house. No one ever suggests that neither of the two of them have to stay home in order to parent the two kids? Not sure why? For whatever reason those responsibilities require that half the adults in the household pause their entire career trajectory while their children attend high school for some reason. That aside, the kids are also not wont to play favorites as they might in a lazier film, and even call to bid them congratulations at the news of their parents impending divorce. Similarly, there are a variety of women eager to offer themselves up to Cumberbatch’s sexual gratification, including patron saint of lesbians Kate McKinnon, whose appearance in the film seems to bless an otherwise hyper-hetero storyline with a hallpass from the gays.
Cumberbatch’s toxic masculinity monologue while running is absolutely fabulous as is his recognition deep into the second act that he should avoid “being a dick.” Both sides of the couple are hyperaware of their own shortcomings and the ways in which they self-sabotage and snipe on each other out of their own insecurities, which makes the movie feel like it’s being fastidious to find legitimately tragic exchanges to break them apart. Their trip to NYC seems like such a lovely twist when the audience has already been eased slowly into the disintegration of their marriage. Instead, we get the whiplash of their mutual interest in repairing their relationship through friendship, spontaneity, and a change of scenery, so the sabotaging of that weekend is all the more acute. Allison Janey is criminally underused in this and almost every other movie, and that aside, you probably didn’t see this movie even despite the fact that it constitutes part of a serendipitous diptych of break-up movies out in successive weeks this month (The Roses and Splittsville). Definitely worth adding to the completionist’s list after The Lovers.
