THE RICH MAN'S WIFE
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(Hollywood/Caravan) Starring: Halle Berry, Peter Greene, Clive Owen, Christopher McDonald. Screenplay: Amy Holden Jones. Producers: Roger Birnbaum, Julie Bergman Sender. Director: Amy Holden Jones. Running Time: 96 minutes. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, violence) Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I'm walking on very thin ice as I prepare to discuss THE RICH MAN'S WIFE, because in order to explain what is really wrong with it, I'm going to have to reveal some critical plot details. Sure, I could try to tap-dance around it, but in so doing the context would probably still make it clear what to expect, and I wouldn't have the luxury of discussing particulars. So I'm going to do something I've never done before: I'm going to encourage you not to read this review if you have any intention of seeing THE RICH MAN'S WIFE. Please skip to the bottom, where you will note my less than enthusiastic rating, and avoid my point-by-point analysis of how a rather mundane thriller can become an actively annoying one.
The title character in THE RICH MAN'S WIFE is Josie Potenza (Halle Berry), the young spouse of wealthy television executive Tony Potenza (Christopher McDonald). The marriage is not a happy one, however, and when Tony bails out on a romantic weekend for business, Josie seeks comfort with Cole Wilson (Peter Greene), a man she meets in a bar. Their conversation turns to Josie's unhappiness with Tony, a problem Cole suggests solving by killing Tony. Josie bolts at the suggestion -- and away from Cole -- but Cole decides to do the job anyway. When he reveals to Josie what he has done, Cole makes it clear that they are in this together -- he demands $30,000 or he will tell the police that Josie, the person who stood to gain the most from Tony's death, was the one who arranged it.
That is a decent enough premise for a psychological thriller, but writer/director Amy Holden Jones doesn't begin to make it pay off. After an interminable opening which takes several trite scenes to show us how unhappy the Potenzas are when one good one should have done the job, THE RICH MAN'S WIFE introduces us to Cole, and any chance at originality vanishes. To Peter Greene's credit, he does the best he can with the part as written, which is as a happy-go-lucky sadist. If Cole is more well-intentioned and genuinely obsessive in his murderous behavior, Josie's dilemma becomes a more compelling one, one which might be solved by brains rather than by gunfire.
But there was never really any chance for that to happen because -- here's the big revelation, so don't say I didn't warn you -- we discover in the film's final moments that Josie herself engineered everything, and has been spinning an elaborate lie to the police. Even though I smelled it coming as soon as I saw that the story was set up as a flashback, I still cringed when I saw Halle Berry smirk in triumph and get in the car with her co-conspirator Nora (Clea Lewis, in a performance which jump-starts the film with its only measure of intentional idiosyncrasy). Not only had I been subjected to a mediocre thriller, but nothing I had seen mattered at all. THE RICH MAN'S WIFE is an elaborate cheat, and the ending is an opportunity to dupe the audience into believing it had been watching something unusually clever instead of something unusually lazy.
"Ah," some of you must be musing to yourselves, "but isn't that scenario he just described remarkably similar to THE USUAL SUSPECTS, a film widely praised for its cleverness? How is THE RICH MAN'S WIFE so different?" In one extremely significant way: in THE RICH MAN'S WIFE, the ending serves absolutely no dramatic purpose. Too few critics of THE USUAL SUSPECTS gave it credit for making Keaton's desire to go legitimate a critical element in the resolution of the story; the final revelations make him a tragic character, and there is evidence to allow us to reach different conclusions. No such evidence exists in THE RICH MAN'S WIFE. If the revelation that the story is an complete hoax serves any purpose, it is as an excuse for suspense cliches (see, that's what they would be _expecting_) or for day to turn miraculously to night for added artificial tension.
There is a smug pseudo-feminism in Amy Holden Jones' script, a sense that we should be inspired to whoops of "You go, girls!" because Josie and Nora do in the obnoxious men in their lives and dupe more men to get away with it, or inspired to self-flagellation because we have under-estimated them. But Jones denies us the chance to under-estimate them because we're never allowed to estimate them in the first place. She isn't playing with expectations or with genre conventions. She's playing us for suckers.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 business-as-usual suspects: 3.
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