'The Wife' review: A marriage comes unraveled as nerves get frayed

Made by adults for adults, Swedish filmmaker Björn Runge's "The Wife" — based on Meg Wolitzer's celebrated novel — is a revealing and intimate look into a marriage and the dark bargains couples sometimes have to make with each other.

It’s late at night in 1992 when we meet Joan (Glenn Close) and Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) in their Connecticut bedroom. Joan is trying to sleep, but Joe is nervously awaiting an anticipated phone call to hear if he's won the Nobel Prize for literature. He soon receives the good news, but the award exacerbates strains in the marriage and exposes arrangements that may have outlived their usefulness. In the time leading up to their trip to Stockholm, Joe, convincingly played by Pryce, is revealed to be an arrogant and self-centered individual with blowhard tendencies.

As masterfully played by Close, Joan is an enigmatic woman of great personal dignity who keeps her own counsel, and always says and does just the right thing. There is an almost indefinable air about Joan in the face of this great news, the troubling sense that all is not right. Unhappy in a more pronounced way is the couple’s son, David (played by Max Irons, son of actor Jeremy Irons), an aspiring but antagonistic writer who yearns for good words from this father that never seem to be forthcoming.

Joan’s bleak mood is revealed in a series of flashbacks that alternate with scenes leading up to the Nobel ceremony. These sequences in which a young Joan (well-played by Close’s daughter, Annie Starke) and a young Joe (Harry Lloyd) show her as a promising writing student and Joe as her unhappily married professor. We also see Joan’s meeting with disenchanted novelist Elaine Mozell (an effective Elizabeth McGovern).

These situations come to a head in Stockholm, where adult Joan and Joe go at each other hammer and tongs in scenes of satisfying intensity that have been years in the making. The plot reveals may not always be convincing, but the emotions are.