It’s hard to imagine what a faithful remake of Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses (1989), adapted from the novel by Warren Adler, would look like in 2025. It’s a pitch-black, sickly fable of a marriage felled by material obsessions, driven into a death spiral of attempted murder, assault, and feline fatality.
It’s not that it couldn’t be recreated today, more that the impulse for it isn’t there. Love is hard. We know that. It’s dead and buried in Tinder’s “About me” section. What screenwriter Tony McNamara has teased out in his new iteration, simply named The Roses, is an even crueller tragedy: that two people can be entirely aware of the pitfalls and still drive into them headfirst.
