Marriage to The Bitter End

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

WAR OF THE ROSES Directed by Danny DeVito

Screenplay by Michael Leeson

Everything has come up roses for the Roses. Oliver (Michael Douglas) has + made partner at his influential law firm. Barbara (Kathleen Turner) has converted her catering service from busywork to flourishing business. The kids are trouble free and accepted by all the right schools. The last expensive antique has been placed in the last empty space in their exquisitely restored house. In other words, disaster now looms.

For the habit of discontent has been the engine driving their lives. And the only thing left to be discontented about is contentedness. Suddenly Barbara can't stand the way Oliver chews his food. Or his insistence on correcting the details when she tries to tell dinner-party stories. When he suffers what at first looks like a heart attack -- it turns out to be a hiatal hernia -- she cannot quite make it to the emergency room to fake anxiety and sympathy. That night, she proposes separation.

So far, so realistic. One imagines them heading for the sort of civilized divorce settlement that people with a fair amount of community property to protect generally work out. No such luck for the Roses. All kinds of good luck for moviegoers willing to follow director Danny DeVito and screenwriter Michael Leeson down an increasingly dark and comedically dangerous path. The problem is their house, symbol of everything they have struggled to achieve. Barbara is willing to forgo alimony if she can keep it. Oliver is ready to pay her almost anything if he can have it. His lawyer (nicely played by DeVito) discovers an obscure statute under which they can divorce yet continue to live under the roof on which they have lavished their truest love.

This is a terrible idea, an invitation to declare a war of attrition. It opens at a level just beyond practical joking: he saws the heel off every shoe in her closet; she totals his collection of Staffordshire. Soon enough, fires are started. And not long thereafter, the situation turns life threatening, first to household pets caught in the cross fire, then to the combatants.

What is wonderful about the film is that the filmmakers are no more willing to compromise their black comic vision of marriage than the Roses are willing to compromise their differences. Both ends are pursued to a conclusion that is bitter, surprising and utterly logical. But it is the style with which this wild farce is developed that sustains our horrified interest and keeps us laughing as the darkness gathers around Barbara and Oliver.

DeVito's transformation of a sun-splashed showplace into a haunted house is admirable, and so is his pacing. Turner is, needless to say, beautiful when she's angry -- sinuous, calculating, purring before she pounces. Douglas makes something equally good of the self-righteousness and self-pity with which some males exercise territorial imperatives. And both contrive to suggest that their warfare is a kind of perverse courtship, a form of preening designed to achieve a surrender that goes far beyond the sexual. You can take or leave the implication that all marriages (and all divorces) may have that as their ultimate goal. But it would be wrong to ignore a film that blends incautious comedy and cautionary morality so expertly.