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The Rose War, a remake without spice [critique]
This attempt to re -read the little classic Danny Devito finds neither sociological finesse nor destroyer energy
It starts, in the soundtrack, with a slightly soft recovery of the Happy Together Turtles. Excellent way, even if probably completely involuntary, to set the tone for a film which is itself a useless “cover”, a faded and bland remake of a classic of US comedy, signed Danny Devito in 1989.
Rose War vintage 2025 does not work absolutely, and it is first believed that it is because the payment of cartoons account between the pink spouses (Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, who replace Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas), intervenes too late, only in the last half hour, after a long hour and a half of tortuous introspection, painful therapy of couple Vachards – but not very nasty, nor tasty.
Then we see the original film again, and we realize that he obeyed the same structure: amazing as we remember the Devito only for the destroy excess of his climax (Douglas who pisses in the resistance dish, a turner stuck in the crystal chandelier …), while the essential was elsewhere, in the careful study of the disintegration of the love of rose, couple of yuppies, Zénith and their children sent to Harvard, to bump against the walls of their magnificent prison -like villa, suddenly discovering the nightmarish horizon of the Reaganian dream. More depressed comedy than funny tunes, therefore.
Why then was what walked so well at the time completely collapsed here? Questions of style, rhythm, point of view, talent in the way of grasping the air. Where Devito knew very well where he was going, cleverly orchestrating a long crescendo, methodically going from the study of manners to the game of massacre, the version of Jay Roach (the director of My stepfather and me and Austin Powersback to comedy after Scandal et Dalton Trumbo) and screenwriter Tony McNamara (Favorite, Poor creatures, Cruella…) Gives the spectator the impression of witnessing the laborious brainstorm of a team of authors wondering how to modernize Rose War.
The inversion of roles between man and woman (it is now madam who succeeds socially and boils the pot, while Monsieur decorates their dream house) is a false track, since the female character will end up going here for a selfish careerist – which sounds much more reactive than the original, in which Michael Douglas made the mistake of considering Madame Rose as a superb bibelot more in her collection that she was going to rebiff. Thematic tracks set up at the start of the film (the Rose are now English who settle in the United States and must compose with their friends who are crazy about firearms) are abandoned along the way.
Jay Roach is trying to find his reflexes as a specialist in the 2000s prout-comedia (Olivia Colman vomited in the bathtub when she has drunk too much, the dialogues are full of “fucking” …) but the outrageous jokes seem forced. The worst being undoubtedly this photo in vibrant colors, which makes the film look like an all-sourish comedy calibrated for the prime time of TF1, when Devito and its leader Op ‘Stephen H. Burum (faithful acolyte of Brian de Palma) put in style everywhere, delirious close-ups, ostentatious camera movements, visually demonstrating that the marriage is sometimes a grandio fiction that the interested parties. None of this here, so much so that when the grand final arrives and the pink start to show the fangs, we totally laugh at knowing what will happen to them, to them and their superb furniture.
By Jay Roach. With Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kate McKinnon… released on August 27, 2025
