We are so used to the enemies-to-lovers trope in films and books that we can hardly imagine it in reverse. It is, however, neither rare nor unusual—in fiction or in real life. Warren Adler may not be the first literary figure to envision lovers turning into rivals and marriages falling apart in wild and violent ways, but his 1981 classic, The War of the Roses, has become the nomenclature for divorce—as Adler himself observed; further immortalised by a 1989 film adaptation directed by Danny DeVito.
“Only marriage is sacred. Not divorce.” The second and most recent adaptation of the story, by Jay Roach, confirms this adage from the book. In this Adler multiverse, marriage and the beginning of its end is nothing short of a theatre of the absurd.
The Roses sees a British couple, Theo and Ivy Rose (played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman) fall madly in love. They move to America, have two children, and build their lives. Theo is an architect on the rise and supports Ivy’s avocations as a chef. He does not want her to die caught up at the “crucifix of family life”—it is easier to support a spouse when you do not feel threatened by them. One stormy night, however, tips the scale. The same whimsical storm that breaks his career—both figuratively and literally, as his soon-to-inaugurate building collapses—makes hers, bringing luck with customers, critics, and their rave reviews. Theo steps back and chooses to “build children instead of houses” while Ivy steps out and beyond. With time, they forget the “love” but cling to its unhinged “madness”. Their bitterness stems from the “sporadic hatred” they share for one another. Chaos begins to unfold as this bitterness pours out of their subconscious and becomes visibly uncomfortable, to friends and to themselves.
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There are, of course, structural variations in each model of the original story. As is often the case with remakes and reimaginations, old elements are withdrawn, and new elements are introduced. This mocktail-making, however, can be a risky business. Experiments can go wrong, as the 2025 cinematic pursuit of the Roses did.
In Tony McNamara’s writing the tragicomedy originally envisioned by Warren Adler fizzles out, something that its 1989 counterpart had managed to preserve. Some things do not make sense. For instance, the brief transition of Ivy—who is already a working chef and plans to move to America to live a life of freedom, which is also how Theo met her—into a dependent wife and a mother, and later into the owner of a small-town cafe. Why? To be able to show her resurrected success as a publicly admired businesswoman? Unnecessary. Then there is Theo’s feeling of having been left behind—no doubt partly a result of centuries of patriarchal mollycoddling. He wishes to go back to the chase of a working life but does little to fight for it.
Also unjustified is this huge waste of talent by casting a long line of actors in supporting roles with little substance. Andy Samberg plays the friendly lawyer, Barry, whose own relationship is running on “inertia”. Barry’s unmissable functional depression only reinforces the unfulfilling nature of marriage, something much more prevalent now than in the ‘80s. Kate McKinnon plays Barry’s partner, Amy, whose forwardness and open advances at both Theo and Ivy are but another puny attempt at introducing a possible love interest to rescue failing marriages. Sunita Mani, Ncuti Gatwa, Zoë Chao, and Jamie Demetriou only add to the crowded remake—defeating the purpose of Adler’s vision. Part of the point Adler tried to make through his novel, by not adding friends or any other kind of company in the Roses equation, is the loneliness of undergoing a divorce and to what extreme it can lead people. Perhaps this long parade of friends is planted as witnesses to the undoing of the Roses. If this was Jay Roach’s goal, I am afraid it was only aspirational in nature and remiss in action.
Each passing version mellows down the ferocity of the couple, with very little new being introduced to take its place. The distance between conflict and its resolution (rather, dissolution) keeps shrinking. The original Roses in the 1981 novel, Jonathan and Barbara, exemplify “the vague sense of loss” that the husband feels in his wife’s surety to leave him. From his point of view, the marriage has been smooth; he provides and she relishes. Barbara, however, no longer wishes to live in her husband’s shadow; she wants more from life and to find out what she can make of it. The 1989 on-screen adaptation, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as Oliver and Barbara Rose, takes Barbara’s aspirations from the novel forward. She is more assertive from the outset and Oliver is only mildly blindsided by her indifference, which Turner embodies brilliantly. Oliver, nonetheless, keeps score: “You’ve gotten a hell of a lot more out of knowing me than I’ve gotten out of knowing you,” he yells at her—a sentiment he shares with Jonathan from the novel.
It is the 2025 reimagination that departs the most from the original plot. In an attempt to modernise the old tale, Jay Roach falls short in many capacities. Ivy’s indifference and Theo’s torn ego is established but not convincingly enough. Gender roles are reversed. The relics that both the Roses couple in the ‘80s cherished—Staffordshire figures, for instance—are replaced by high-tech smart homes and material extravagance in the form of Irish moss, rare first editions of books, and Julia Child’s iconic stove from Paris. Reconciliation is not as off-the-table in 2025 as it was in the ‘80s novel and film, in confrontations from concerned friends and an almost defeated therapist. Theo and Ivy claim that they “hate everyone but us” and that counselling should come with discounts if one is to not appreciate their dark humour. Modern changes for modern times but alas, with low impact.
While motifs like the slow but deliberate disintegration of a marriage, one’s disenchantment with their spouse, the unfortunate exchange of bitterness between such a couple, and its ruins, remain intact, there is a sense of detachment from Adler’s and, subsequently, DeVito’s narrative. What The Roses lacks in audacity, it tries to make up in wit, sarcasm, and irony. The dry British humour in the face (and voice) of Colman and Cumberbatch feels less tragic and more comic. They mimic the loathing in words but fail to emote it, which can be a good thing for an unaware, and hence, uncompromised, audience; but for those of us who have tasted the previous “scraps of conversation that always elevated into a rising crescendo of vituperation”—as the au pair from the novel, Ann, describes it—something is amiss.
Although Roach tries to do some damage control by skipping the pets Mercedes (cat) and Benz (dog)—and thank God for it, lest those poor things suffer, as they did in both the previous versions—he is careless with the consequences of his remake on the Roses’ children. In the ‘80s versions, the children are near-adults, living independent lives, suffering only on the periphery as their parents go through a bitter separation. In 2025, no matter how aware and self-sufficient they may seem, they are still teens who will burn harder in the wake of the impending fate that awaits their parents. “You can destroy the legal basis for the family but the biological basis lives on,” the book observes. Such events act as catalysts “forcing adulthood”—a point Roach and McNamara conveniently let slide.
As a generation that has grown up watching shrewd lawyers like Miles Massey (played by George Clooney) in Intolerable Cruelty (2003), or Jeff “Hater” Lewis (played by Rob Corddry) in What Happens in Vegas (2008), we are no strangers to the trope. But in both the Roses movies, there are no vulturistic lawyers. If anything, they are kinder and offer wisdom, asking their clients to reconsider and reconcile. “Oliver, there is no winning in this. There’s only degrees of losing,” DeVito’s character Gavin D’Amato tells his friend. And he is right. “We’re reasonable people,” Jonathan tells his lawyer in the book, hoping for a clean divorce. “That was yesterday,” his lawyer remarks. By now, in the story and beyond, it is established: “a civilised divorce” is an oxymoron.
It is clear by now that Theo and Ivy are not Jonathan and Barbara, but neither are they Edward Albee’s George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They are somewhere and something in between. They are passive, sure, and not as aggressive as their predecessors, whose fights were not just a matter of the extent of “creative punishments” (as Adler calls them) that they could come up with, but also of tenacity—driven by who would last longer in this “who-can-sink-lowest-fastest contest”. They push limits—their own and of their partners—almost deriving sadistic pleasure from each other’s suffering, getting progressively worse. The Roses of 2025 do not even come close to a point of no return. Their jabs lack the shock factor of the original and their condition escalates only briefly, towards the last 20 or so minutes of the film.
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Neither does their tale culminate into the two dilemmas that “rattle the human skull” as Danny DeVito says and Warren Adler personifies in his novel: “How do you hold on to someone who won’t stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won’t go?” Because no one in this 21st century imagination of the Roses is willing to go that far, in either direction. The Jay Roach adaptation lacks the lustre of the first two. It not only drops the “war” part of the story from the title, but also from its contents, making it (relatively) dignified and much less provocative than the original. However, absence of war is not the presence of peace in the Rose household.
As someone who was happily married for 67 years, Warren Adler has surprisingly managed to not only capture the rioting nature of legal separations, but also inspire generations of filmmakers to keep his literary legacy alive. Divorce is and remains an evergreen metaphor for the obscenity people are capable of when threatened and tested—an astute reminder that happily-ever-afters come with an expiry date and hence, must make as persistent an appearance, in books and on screens, as Christmas miracles do. While this latest tryst with Adler’s The War of the Roses may not echo its motto of “Basic hate. Basic war.” the film is entertaining in its own twisted way, albeit softened for the empathetic generation of today.
Nandini Bhatia is a books and culture writer.
