When the greatest compliment you can muster up about your partner is “He has arms”, then you know that somewhere along the way, the relationship may have taken a downturn. Such is the therapy session that we’re dunked into at the opening of The Roses – a romantic caper based on Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses, and starring Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch as a husband and wife whose pride, wrath and envy read like a potted seven deadly sins of marriage.
Cumberbatch’s Theo is a successful architect, his wife Ivy a budding chef who put her career on hold to raise their two children. When a freak storm hits their relocated home of Mendocino, California, destroying Theo’s latest masterwork whilst sending an unexpected crowd to Ivy’s failing hobbyist cafe We’ve Got Crabs, their lots in life are swiftly reversed. Neither, quelle surprise, deals with the change gracefully.
