Truly Dreadful Film

Excellent but underrated film

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

First off let me say that Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner were the perfect choices for this movie! They both gave electric powerful performances and really proved themselves as fine artists. They have awesome chemistry too, we first saw that in Romancing the Stone, but their chemistry in The War of the Roses is a very different kind of chemistry. Yeah sure in the first 15 minutes it shows them making passionate love and becoming infatuated with one another, then comes the kiddies, but really this film is not at all about love, this is NOT a romance story. No it's a movie about an extremely bitter married couple going through a divorce. Neither of the two are willing to give up the elegant nice house they live in. So thus the war begins. "The gloves are off" as Douglas's character states at one point in the film. The script is very well written, it doesn't waste any time or drag on, it entertains the entire runtime, there was not a single moment. Danny DeVito is a talented actor and director, he proves that in this film. Both his acting and his directing are both great. The events that happen throughout the film are bitter and full of anger, but it's very interesting to watch. It runs deep in character development, a movie like this would have to in order to be successful. The movie is not one to view for a "feel good" mood or for when you want something sweet and romantic. If you're in the mood for a dramedy starring two fine actors that is interesting and well written, then I suggest The War of the Roses. 8/10.

I've seen this movie many times before, but not in a very long time. This is a black comedy about a couple, from the moment they meet, through the little stuff that make them start hate each other and up to a complete war that grows worse and worse.This movie is much darker than I remembered, but it's still very funny - and while it obviously fabricates and exaggerates certain situations, it actually shows how awful a divorce process can be, how two people who loved each other come to hate each other and how the process makes them hurt each other as much as possible. It may be fiction, but it's not very far from real life (in fact, there are WORSE divorce situations in real life).Beautiful cinematography by the great Stephen H. Burum (Brian De Palma's regular DP).

... and in the end they cook and eat each other, not the dog. That is the long and short of this film and would have made a good epitaph for both of them. Five years earlier, in 1984, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner had teamed up for the wonderful "Romancing the Stone". As for the sequel...we won't go there. Now they have aged a few years and are playing Oliver and Barbara Rose, a couple on the cusp of middle age. The film starts out with Danny DeVito's character, Gavin, an expensive DC divorce lawyer, describing to a client how he should be generous to the point of pain to the wife he is about to divorce. He tells him how the story of Oliver and Barbara Rose changed him from being a cutthroat attorney to what he is today.So the story starts out with their meeting as young people. You know, even from the beginning, the warning signs are usually there, and in Oliver's case, anybody who introduces himself as a genius who is going to be rich and famous someday is probably not going to care too much about his spouse's opinion, and you'd be right.Time passes. Oliver does become the wealthy attorney and the Roses buy the big house in the city. Barbara spends all of her time collecting antiques and keeping up the house. Once her two children get big enough to not really need her anymore, she decides to go into catering - she has become an excellent cook, plus she has cultivated many influential friends through the years in Washington. To celebrate the launching of her new career she buys a monster truck. Oliver belittles her efforts and asks how many hundreds of meals will she have to cater to pay for that truck? You can tell that this is the last of many straws. But it's not until Oliver thinks he has had a heart attack and Barbara feels relief rather than grief upon the news that she realizes the marriage is over.She tells him she wants a divorce. He refuses to believe she would ditch such a wonderful guy as himself. He gets Gavin to act as his attorney and finds out about an old law that allows people to stay in the house while the divorce is being processed. They snipe at each other in a hundred different ways that I'll let you watch and see for yourself.Ultimately, Barbara tells Oliver an untruth, one so horrifying that for the first time Oliver becomes violent. Oliver barricades them both inside the house and they spend the night in actual combat. I'm not so sure he wants to kill her so much as he wants to capture her, because ultimately he wants to keep her. But Barbara's actions leave no doubt she is trying to kill him, because ultimately she wants to be rid of him. In the end they die in the most ironic way possible. With their dying breath he clutches her hand in his, she shoves it away.Basically this is an exaggeration in action but not attitude of your typical divorce story involving any two people who spent decades together and were truly in love once. You can't do what these two people did to each other and not have been madly in love at one time. As they say, the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.Let me say something about the book this film was based upon - Danny DeVito REALLY wanted Barbara to cook that dog. However, people convinced him that Barbara would have lost all sympathy if she had intentionally killed an innocent dog and fed him to her husband as pate. She would have come across as mean not insane. I know that his advisors were correct.One thing not shown, maybe just to keep the audience curious, was - who did Gavin marry? We hear him talking lovingly to his wife at the end of the film, saying he'll be home soon. Remember, Gavin was a player and one that only liked the leggiest of blondes prior to the death of the Roses. I'll tell you who that was - it was Susan, the Roses' live in housekeeper who was going to college part time, was very sweet and intelligent, but seemed to be nearing 40 and was not physically attractive in the conventional sense at all. I think the film left that part a mystery just so you could fill in the blanks for yourself, plus it gives you something extra to talk about after the film.I highly recommend this one.

A nice and partly funny movie, marriage and children, divorce and nasty settlement, a story who opens the way for marriage crisis of dimensions. Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas has played against each other before - like in "Romancing the stone" and the sequel "Jewel of the Nile", and it's hardly a coniciderence they came together for the third time, the couple made very chemistry on the big screen, everything seemed to fit them both.The most funny thing related to this movie, is that Danny De Vito - here with a great performance, also is the man in the director's chair, also had good parts in those movie I mention, and as far as I know, is a good friend of Douglas privately.Is it something we can learn from this plot? I chosen to let the question stand wide open, but it's not unimaginable that such bitterness and desperation in our real life have I read, and seen countless example of several divorces - but of course, here we got presented a drama like a black comedy, for that sake of the entertainment.Maybe most of the movie's situations stroke better those who already had been through their divorces or two, and I'm not sure I will recommend this movie to anybody, it could end up with bad estrangement for the theme - a partly entertaining story of a marriage on the wrong track, but a pretty good movie to watch.