With The Wife, Glenn Close lays the ghost of Alex For­rest to rest

For more than three decades, Glenn Close has been try­ing to get jus­tice for Alex For­rest. Her Fatal Attrac­tion char­ac­ter – the vio­lent, hyper-sex­u­al lover who sought revenge on Michael Dou­glas’ Dan – is wide­ly regard­ed as one of the great­est movie vil­lains of all time. Yet the film had lit­tle con­cern for Alex: about who she was, what her moti­va­tions were, what her life was like. She is a bun­dle of men­tal ill­ness clichés wrapped up in obvi­ous misog­y­ny. In her new film, The Wife, Close finds clo­sure for Alex in the role of anoth­er woman whose life is upend­ed by a man – she makes sure it’s now her sto­ry to tell.

Dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of Fatal Attrac­tion, Close fought hard for Alex to be sen­si­tive­ly por­trayed. She board­ed the project know­ing it was a chance to get inside the skin of a tor­tured indi­vid­ual and let their voice be heard. In prepa­ra­tion she met with psy­chol­o­gists, hop­ing to unpack Alex’s psy­che, and lob­bied hard to get rid of the now-icon­ic bun­ny boil­ing scene. The end result was a pulpy noir which thrilled audi­ences but large­ly neglect­ed its female characters.

Fatal Attrac­tion pits women against each oth­er, paint­ing one as a venge­ful she-dev­il and the oth­er (Anne Archer’s Beth) as an anaemic, dot­ing moth­er, rather than have them unite around the prob­lem. The film effec­tive­ly gaslit audi­ences into for­giv­ing Dan and ral­ly­ing against Alex, a once con­fi­dent career woman arbi­trar­i­ly turned mani­ac over a man. Dan’s indis­cre­tions are addressed per­func­to­ri­ly, and he is viewed by the film and the char­ac­ter him­self as the vic­tim of the piece.

The Wife takes Close back to a sim­i­lar place and gives her vin­di­ca­tion. Joan Castle­man is a woman who has qui­et­ly endured a life­time of her husband’s impro­pri­ety and allowed his ego to eclipse her own great­ness. Direc­tor Björn Runge has noth­ing but time for Joan and shows her husband’s ulti­mate fate to be entire­ly self-inflict­ed, his brag­gado­cio caus­ing him to implode just as Alex did in 1987. As Joan, Close quiv­ers with rage through­out – her per­for­mance is a mas­ter­class in restraint – and her feel­ings are nei­ther telegraphed to the view­er nor is she shamed for her sublimation.

When regards to its prob­lem­at­ic depic­tion of men­tal health, Fatal Attrac­tion rush­es to vil­lainse Alex for being a lone­ly pub­lish­ing exec­u­tive who is impreg­nat­ed after a one-night stand and left alone in an emp­ty apart­ment, with no friends to speak of. The char­ac­ter is failed by the film, and though The Wife puts Joan through the wringer, it del­i­cate­ly han­dles the fall­out of her bro­ken rela­tion­ship. As the title sug­gests, no one in The Wife mat­ters more than Joan.

The jux­ta­po­si­tion of the mis­treat­ment of Alex and the icon­ic sta­tus of Fatal Attrac­tion with­in pop­u­lar cul­ture is a cru­el reminder of how far we’ve come in depict­ing com­plex women and men­tal health in cin­e­ma. As Close observed recent­ly, ​“It’s in reveal­ing the ​‘why’ of her behav­iour that I think would be very inter­est­ing to peo­ple, because I was not play­ing the great­est vil­lain of all time, I was play­ing a human being who was in crisis.”