Anytime you get two heavyweight actors together and ask them to do battle on screen, the results are almost guaranteed to be electrifying. That’s certainly what the first trailer for The Roses promises. The movie, which is adapted from Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses, stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as a married couple whose relationship disintegrates over the course of the film.
The two play Theo and Ivy, a married couple living an idyllic California life. When Theo’s career crumbles just as Ivy’s is taking off, though, buried resentments in their relationship come to the surface. Andy Samberg, Allison Janney, Ncuti Gatwa, Kate McKinnon, Sunita Mani, Jamie Demetriou, Zoë Chao and Belinda Bromilow are also in the cast. It was directed by Jay Roach.
The novel was already adapted once into 1989’s The War of the Roses, which stars Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, and was directed by Danny DeVito.
“The film is a parable of two people who loved each other intensely, then ended up hating each other intensely and missing the middle ground,” Cumberbatch told Vanity Fair. “Much of it is shockingly recognizable: how we struggle to show love toward the people we love the most, and how this can all go wrong very quickly if we’re not careful about nurturing and nourishing the relationships at the center of our families.”
The first trailer gives us a hint at their unraveling, but we’ll have to wait until Aug. 29 to get a fuller sense of just how dysfunctional things get for the Roses.
