The Housewife

FESTIVAL REVIEW

One of Harvey Weinstein’s lesser but still significant crimes was his influence on late-1990s and early-2000s Hollywood, when he helped popularize the Oscar-bait historical drama. Take an important subject, a handsome period production, give a respected actor an accent and a couple of “serious” acting outbursts, and the Oscars would follow. The formula gave us some truly tedious films, occasionally at the expense of far more deserving work (The Reader over The Dark Knight, anyone?), but worse, it would turn real human tragedy into a shortcut for manufactured tears and artificial importance.

A couple of decades removed from that era, we can now happily look at The Housewife almost like a parody of those films, and I could easily imagine Harvey Weinstein campaigning it into ten Oscar nominations twenty years ago. Ben Shirinian’s feature debut has a respectable production design, an artificially clean cinematography by Michael Merriman, a lovely piano-led score, and, finally, Naomi Watts playing Hermine Ryan, an Austrian woman whose unassuming life as a Queens housewife has become the perfect facade for hiding a horrific past as a Nazi concentration camp guard. It is an intriguing contradiction to build a film around: a monstrous human who has spent years becoming the picture of harmless American domesticity, especially after the United States granted her citizenship and higher-ups began working behind the scenes to prevent an investigation from exposing their mistake. The Housewife, however, becomes more interested in dramatizing these ideas into whatever will maximize the emotional satisfaction of watching ‘Important’ Cinema.

Watts certainly commits to the role, delivering a clearly studied performance that the quality of her surroundings completely undermines. She gives Hermine a peculiar stiffness that exposes how every smile, step, and movement is rehearsed, and Shirinian has some fun early on, even turning her into almost a slasher villain at one point, materializing at the door offering Joseph (Tye Sheridan) some delicious cookies. Those moments before the truth is revealed are when the film is at its best, thankfully avoiding building much suspense about who Joseph is truly searching for. The moments Hermine cracks, by contrast, are embarrassingly terrible, with Watts turning into a caricature as she curses in German and shakes her arms uncontrollably. At least it makes for some good unintentional comedy.

Yet neither Watts nor the film ever gets us much closer to the person underneath the fabricated persona. Did she love Russell? Could she have maintained this facade for the rest of her life? What did she actually feel about the atrocities she committed? Even The Reader tried to wrestle with these similar questions with more complexity.

Watts still acts circles around most of her co-stars. Sheridan, seemingly not caring very much, gives a lifeless performance, never convincing us of Joseph’s determination (I would hardly know he had any if his wife did not keep mentioning it), while Michael Imperioli has almost the opposite problem, too eager to be here, overacting every line. Outside the recognizable faces, things get even rougher. Hermine’s friends, Joseph’s wife, and Joseph’s editor often feel like contemporary actors playing dress-up, constantly pulling you out of the film with exaggerated expressions. The exception is Luke Evans, who gets surprisingly little from the screenplay but still manages to convey Russell’s conflicting feelings as everything he believes about his wife begins falling apart.

The terrible screenplay only makes matters worse, particularly in a second half built around one artificial conflict after another, where characters repeatedly declare “I’m out” only to magically change their minds the next time we see them. Somewhere inside all of this is fascinating material about Hermine herself, the life she managed to build, and an American government actively working against an investigation that might expose its own failures, but the film rushes through much of it on its way to a laughable trial. By that point, I was mostly thinking about Hermine’s cookies. Perhaps they should have offered some to the TIFF audience to make the whole thing go down easier.

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