The War of the Roses (1989)

Danny DeVito's The War of the Roses arrives from 1989, a year when a divorce comedy could still end with both parties dead on a marble floor and be sold as a date movie. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner play Oliver and Barbara Rose, a Washington couple whose eighteen-year marriage curdles into a property dispute with fatalities. The title borrows from the Wars of the Roses, and the film earns the allusion. This is not a story about two people who fell out of love. It is a story about two people who would sooner destroy a house than let the other keep it.

Turner's Barbara carries a real grievance. She surrendered a career to build a home, and when the children leave she finds the arrangement hollow. The film grants her that regret and then declines to make a case of it. Her awakening becomes one more weapon in a symmetrical slaughter, and the screenplay keeps its sympathies evenly distributed, which is to say it withholds them from everyone. The couple's fixation on objects, the antiques, the Morgan, the house itself, invites a reading about materialism, though the target is personal avarice, not the economic order that produced it. Race, sexuality, the climate, the body, the mind: none of it intrudes. This is a closed world of prosperous white professionals, and the film is content to leave it closed.

DeVito, who also plays the lecherous attorney Gavin D'Amato, frames the whole disaster as a cautionary tale told to a client. The moral is practical, not political. Be generous to the point of discomfort, or go home and remember why you married. The film never lectures, never sermonizes, and never pretends its miserable couple stands for anything larger than itself. It is a nasty, well-made thing, and it knows precisely what it is.