Start the week with a film: A divorce from hell in ‘The War of the Roses’

Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas set the screen on fire in the 1980s hits Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile. In The War of the Roses (1989), something else is burning between the characters played by Turner and Douglas – their marriage.

Having met at an auction where Barbara (Turner) insistently outbids Oliver (Douglas), they really should have known better. For 18 years, the marriage holds together – she is the perfect domestic goddess while he is the typical provider – until Barbara confesses that she cannot stand Oliver anymore.

The War of the Roses can be rented from Prime Video.

Danny DeVito’s movie is a black comedy disguised as a cautionary tale about divorce.

The Barbara-Oliver decoupling is stuck on the question of who will get the house that he has funded and she has painstakingly designed. The proceedings are nearly as acrimonious as the actual War of the Roses, which took place between rival houses in the fifteenth century in England. This conflict influenced George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones books, among others. In DeVito’s film, written by Michael J Leeson, the estrangement between Oliver and Barbara is no less brutal, and is often very funny too.

They come up with devious ways to get back at each other. It’s her cat versus his...

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