Film and television director Jay Roach is a master of calamitous comedy that snarls, slobbers and snaps but is nonetheless delightfully entertaining to those of us who savor bashing battles royale -- Austin Powers, Fockers, Bombshell.
His broadly outrageous remake of 1989's The War of the Roses (Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas) has been whittled down to just The Roses but has not dropped "the war." In fact, Roach expands the battlefield, amps up the emotional and material destruction and spreads the dysfunction of the central pairing -- icy Ivy and theatrical Theo (Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, respectively) -- to their closest associates and friends, each more callous and self-involved than the one before.
Roach serves up a banquet of withholding resentment as Ivy's career as a California celebrity chef rockets and Theo's as a visionary architect crashes to earth, literally. Theo, an unemployable pariah consumed by passive aggression, turns their children into fitness weapons of destruction after Ivy's years of fatty indulgence. It's this dynamic that offers the freshest grace notes to the spirited rancor of domestic intranquility. The airport scene where they send the kids (Hala Finley and Wells Rappaport) off to a sports school in Miami says so much about this family and the connective tissue that they lack.
Unhappiness continues to mount, divorce proceedings are initiated, weapons drawn and the fiery ending, well, inevitable. It's a blast!
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