Any long-term marriage or partnership inevitably involves a degree of compromise and balance and also those delicate, mixed, often quirky, characteristics which somehow seem to work. In this relationship, Joe is casual, whereas Joan is elegant; he is vain, whereas she is self-effacing…
Joan, much loved and admired, has ignored her husband’s various infidelities, his excuses, and his bad behaviour with grace and humour… but with Joe’s Nobel Prize award, she is forced to confront the uneven compromises and sacrifices of her life (particularly when, at cocktail parties, Joe blandly tells people that his wife “doesn’t write”).
Of course, in many ways, the film mirrors some of the sexist, even patriarchal, attitudes of that time (two scenes in the film are telling: one in which Joan is working as a reader in a publishing house, whose smug and cynical editors make it very clear what they think of women writers; and another where a female author strongly advises her to “give it all up” as far as any literary ambitions she may have, because of the difficulties of being a successful writer in a ‘man’s world’).
Anyway, I think I’ll leave it at that as far as the plot is concerned.
All I would say is that this is a brilliant, dark-humoured, timely, poignant, powerful and very enjoyable film… and watching Glenn Close’s performance is very definitely one not to be missed.
PS: Inevitably I suppose, with Moira and I having been married for ‘well over 40 years’, it made me think of our own decision-making, at the start of our marriage, when it came to our respective careers. I think we’d both agree that, in the end, we came to shared, sensible, logical decisions (but who can tell?). With Moira studying languages at university and me architecture, my prospective working life was probably more defined and, perhaps in most people eyes, seen as the more ‘serious career’ (I haven’t expressed that very well but, hopefully, you’ll understand what I mean?). Her course finished earlier than mine (architecture courses then used to go on ‘forever’ and involved 3 years at college, a ‘year out’, then 2 years back at college, before a final ‘year out’ working in preparation for professional practice exams) and she was keen to live and work in Paris. I had suggested(?) that it made sense for us to remain in the UK until after I’d fully qualified (ie. after my professional practice exam)… and that’s what we ended up doing. Had I REALLY been prepared to work in Paris (me, the utterly useless linguist that I am!)? I THINK I did… even though it might have been a somewhat foolhardy pipedream. Of course, by the time I’d passed my exams, Moira had settled into a job with the Open University (NOT using her language skills). We never went to live in Paris. Instead, we bought a house in Oxford; children followed; I was soon offered an architectural partnership with a High Wycombe practice; Moira ended up becoming the parent-at-home in our daughters’ early years.
Yes, I ended up having a ‘successful’ architectural career and ran my practice for nearly 30 years (I was never quite in the same league as a Nobel Prize-winning author as Joe Castleman!). I was pretty good at what I did, but I was never going to set the architectural world on fire… but that’s about it.
Moira is FAR more intelligent than me. Incredibly literate, knowledgeable and well-read (and mathematical, and artistic!). I could see her working in the upper echelons of the Foreign Office or even the EU (for goodness sake!!).
Do I feel guilty about effectively having limited Moira’s career opportunities (although it didn't feel like that at the time)? Yes, of course I do… but that’s the course that we BOTH chose to take, rightly or wrongly. I suspect, nearly 50 years on and with ‘partner roles’ having changed enormously over the years, we just might have done things differently. Who knows? x
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