Enjoy the Roses... but watch out for the thorns!

As they play a warring married couple in a remake of the classic Eighties film, The War of The Roses, Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch on the brilliance of British comedy, the art of good communication and how their onscreen repartee gave them a friendship 'wobble'

- By Gabrielle Donnelly

THE over-earnest American marriage therapist peers at warring couple Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman with obvious displeasure. “This is verbal cruelty,” she scolds them. “I think,” responds Benedict with crushing British politeness, “we call that repartee.”

And so the tone is set for the start of Jay Roach’s pitch-black new comedy The Roses, based on the now-iconic 1989 classic The War of The Roses, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. In the words of Roach himself, the new film is more a “re-imagining” of the original than a straightforward remake. Douglas’s wealthy lawyer Oliver Rose and his bored wife Barbara are now transformed into Theo and Ivy Rose, an architect and a chef, whose habit of teasing each other with mock insults intensifies gradually as their marriage begins to disintegrate into active — albeit hugely entertaining for the viewer — viciousness.

The Roses of 2025 are a very different variety from those of the earlier film. For one thing, they both have careers, not just one of them. For another, their friends include a range of races and sexual orientations that simply would not have been countenanced back in the 1980s. Possibly most significantly of all, the new Roses, although they both live and work in let-it-all-hang-out Northern California, are — and will remain to their souls — British.

“I’m so much a fan of so many British comedians like the Monty Pythons, Douglas Adams and Sacha Baron Cohen,” says Jay Roach, who, as veteran director of the Austin Powers film series, is hardly a newcomer to the genre. “British people sound way smarter and funnier than Americans do.

I personally come from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and when I go to Los Angeles or New York it’s intimidating for me because I’m always aware I’m never going to sound like the people there.