‘The Roses’ Review: A British Take on Marital Warfare

Long before it was a novel or a hit movie in the 1980s, historians knew the “Wars of the Roses” as a brutal 15th-century English civil war between the Houses of Lancaster and York, each identified by their heraldic flowers. More than five centuries later, Warren Adler borrowed that name for his 1981 novel The War of the Roses, a darkly comic look at a marriage in meltdown. Danny DeVito’s 1989 film adaptation, with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, cemented the story’s reputation as the ultimate divorce-from-hell comedy.

Now comes a new version, simply titled The Roses, which partly returns the tale to its British roots. Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman star as Theo and Ivy Rose, a couple who meet, marry, and start a family in the UK before relocating to the United States. He’s a successful architect in California, overseeing the construction of a flashy museum; she’s a former chef turned full-time mother, devoting herself to their two children. The film opens with the Roses in therapy—a glimpse of what’s to come—but for a good stretch they seem like a happy, functional family.

That shift in emphasis marks the main difference between this adaptation and earlier ones. Rather than plunging headlong into divorce combat, director Jay Roach (best known for the Austin Powers and Meet the Fockers films) spends much of the running time establishing the Roses as a couple. Only near the end does the movie descend into open warfare, and that tonal change feels at odds with the sly, cultural-clash comedy that precedes it. Up until then, The Roses plays almost like a tart transatlantic sitcom, mining humor from an English couple navigating life in sunny California before slowly realizing they may not be meant for each other.

The unraveling begins subtly. Encouraged by Theo, Ivy opens a seafood restaurant that initially struggles, while he celebrates the grand opening of his museum project. One stormy night changes everything: hurricane-force winds destroy Theo’s museum, costing him his job, while a detour caused by the same storm brings a famed food critic to Ivy’s restaurant, launching her success. Their fortunes flip, resentment creeps in, and soon he’s the stay-at-home dad obsessively training their children in athletics, while she becomes a thriving business owner. Even the dream home he designs and she pays for begins to feel more like a battleground than a refuge.

Roach takes plenty of liberties with Adler’s original story, and in many ways the film is stronger for it. Some of the sharpest scenes pit the Roses—acerbic, sarcastic, very British—against their Californian friends, played by Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, among others. Samberg’s character, their lawyer, echoes the role DeVito played in the original, while the couple’s bizarre social outings (including a surreal trip to a shooting range) provide some of the movie’s funniest moments. For much of the film, Cumberbatch and Colman excel at weaponizing irony and barbed wit, finding strength as a couple by standing apart from less cynical Americans around them.

But the tone eventually curdles. What begins as cutting sarcasm slides into cruelty, contempt, and finally physical violence. And that’s where The Roses falters. The film loses much of its bite once it abandons verbal sparring for flying objects and slapstick brutality. Roach “Americanizes” the conflict, and neither Colman nor Cumberbatch are as compelling in broad, destructive mayhem as they are when their daggers are purely verbal. The result is a movie that’s at its sharpest when it diverges from Adler’s original, and at its weakest when it circles back to it.