THE STORY – A New York Times journalist tracks down a potential Nazi officer living secretly in Queens, New York. But when he befriends the suspect’s elegant and charming wife, the implications of his investigation become much more unsettling.
THE CAST – Naomi Watts, Luke Evans, Tye Sheridan, Michael Imperioli, Lena Olin & Debi Mazar
THE TEAM – Ben Shirinian (Director) & Alyssa Hill (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 102 Minutes
Ben Shirinian’s “The Housewife” opens with an extended shot of a tea kettle coming to a boil. A perfect image in theory to open this domestic drama that should become a sort of pressure cooker or alarm. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t quite live up to that opening image, capturing the domestic life of post-war America well but falling so slack with tension for so long that it never reaches the dramatic heights it aspires to. Instead, it becomes a middlebrow historical drama, one that explores fascinating thematic territory but can’t stop itself from over-egging the story’s most melodramatic beats.
It’s 1964 New York and Hermine Ryan (Naomi Watts) is living a carefully curated life in Queens. Her hair is curled tight, her pearls lay just so, and everyone agrees that her oatmeal raisin cookie recipe is the best in the church group. An Austrian native, she’s nervous about her upcoming citizenship interview, despite having no reason to be. “America is the dream,” she says, because you have the freedom to be whoever you want to be. But Hermine and her construction worker husband Russel (Luke Evans) are put to the test when New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld (Tye Sheridan) shows up unannounced, following a tip from famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Charmed by Hermine’s kindness, he leaves before questioning her husband, unwilling to ruin her life. What will Joseph do about reporting the story, especially when he realizes the full truth behind Hermine’s past?
Inspired by the true story of Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, Shirinian and screenwriter Alyssa Hill treat the story like it’s fiction, building up to multiple reveals of the truth that will shock no one with even a passing knowledge of history. But for those coming in blind, the film’s structure builds tension quite effectively, leading to several reveals that land with blunt force. Shirinian notably builds up Evans’s presence slowly until he finally speaks well into the film’s first act, shooting him like a hulking shadow that haunts the frame. The eventual reveal of his voice plays as a perfect release of all the tension built up to that point. The relationship between husband and wife is both constructed and broken down carefully, with Watts and Evans digging in deep and fully committing to the extreme emotions at play. The relationship between Hermine and Joseph, on the other hand, feels unfocused and awkwardly rendered; in particular, the attempts at sexual tension feel like a poor attempt at emulating “The Reader,” another film about guilt, forgiveness, and the long tail of justice following the Holocaust.
Much like that Oscar-winning film, “The Housewife” features an emotionally complex performance at its center. Watts always excels when playing characters putting on a performance, and Hermine spends every second of every day giving the performance of her life. The more her polished veneer slips, the more desperate she becomes; the more she loses control, the more control Watts exerts, delivering a fierce performance of a woman who has told herself whatever lies she’s needed to in order to justify her own actions, but unable to escape the truth of them. To the extent that the film works as a morality tale, it’s mostly due to Watts’s commitment to her character’s duality, begging the question of how much a person can truly change. Her terrifying outbursts genuinely feel like a scream from her innermost self, desperate to break free from its prison.
While Hill’s screenplay parallels Hermine’s story with Joseph’s, Sheridan is a far less compelling actor than Watts, rendering his moral dilemma much less interesting. Joseph’s journalistic obligation to report the truth gets a workout as he wrestles with what the consequences of doing so would be. Innocent people will be avenged, yes, but other innocent people will also be hurt. What is right? Is the past the past? Can a good person do horrible things and not become horrible themselves? Potent questions, to be sure, but Sheridan lacks the depth as a performer to make the film’s exploration of them through Joseph interesting to watch.
Hanging in the Ryans’ living room is a painting of an ashen landscape. It seems to be from Austria, where Hermine and Russel met after the war and fell in love. It’s also, quite obviously, a metaphor for what living among such horrors as the Holocaust does to one’s soul. War makes strange bedfellows, pushing regular people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. Does that make them bad people? “The Housewife” leaves that up to the audience to decide for themselves, with a potent reminder: before any reconciliation, there must be a reckoning. Yes, forgiveness is possible, but only if the offending party acknowledges what they have done and what it meant. That’s a powerful message for the present day, but the film delivering it could have stood to take on those questions in a less generic way. Instead of a reckoning, “The Housewife” feels more like a retrospective news program – it makes some salient points, but we’ve heard them all before.
