The Rich Man's Wife - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed, "I wish we could simply dispense with a review and handle things this way: You go see the movie, and then we'll sit down and have a long and very detailed talk. And you will try to explain to me how the last scene in the movie, the one that is supposed to provide the key, fits in with what has gone before. Because I don't think it does. Or can. Or should . . . The movie proceeds more or less satisfactorily for 94 minutes, and then in the last 60 seconds expects us to revise everything we thought we knew, or guessed, or figured out - just because of an arbitrary ending. That went against my grain. It wasn't playing fair . . . This plot is not blindingly original; its elements are familiar from many other crime stories. But it does become intriguing because the writing is good and the characters are original . . . What I was not prepared for was the twist at the end, which doesn't seem to follow from anything that went before, and makes all of my speculation irrelevant. Am I holding the ending against the entire movie? Yes, I suppose I am. The Rich Man's Wife is not a great movie, but it's competent and effective enough, and I might have been tempted to give it a recommendation if I hadn't felt so cheated at the end. Somehow a movie like this establishes a contract with us, an unspoken agreement that some things cannot be doubted even though others are up for grabs. When a few of the sure things turn out to be tricks, that's part of the fun. But when everything is smoke and mirrors, I walk out wondering, where is Keyser Soze when we really need him?"

Lawrence van Gelder of the New York Times said, "The film owes no little debt to Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Strangers on a Train and to all those movies in which homicidal maniacs pop up unexpectedly, lone women hear creaking doors and ominous footsteps, thunderstorms erupt at convenient moments and couples who share disturbing confidences speed along dark, deserted roads while windshield wipers sweep across close-ups of their tense faces. Rich Man's Wife also owes a debt to its audience, whose credibility is sorely taxed at turning points where sensible individuals would disagree with Josie's actions."

Calling the film "a passable genre piece with weird plot twists and mediocre acting from the gorgeous Berry," Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle compared it to "the old Lana Turner melodramas with the glossy sets, soft-focus photography and operatic emotional range." He continued, "Jones serves this slice of ham with slick direction and Haskell Wexler's handsome photography, and keeps twisting the plot and our presumptions right up to the final scene. It's diverting, good-looking trash, and it might be more defensible if Berry were genuinely talented and didn't have such a thin, high-school-cheerleader voice."

Barbara Shulgasser of the San Francisco Examiner felt the only reason to see the film "is to watch a charming actress called Clea Lewis . . . play a wronged ex-wife and steal the show in two short scenes. The rest of the movie is so cluttered with old plot twists and a lame attempt at what the filmmakers must have thought would be a surprise ending that the dialogue was drowned out half the time by audience members pleading with characters not to do the same dumb things we've all seen movie characters do hundreds of times before in equally bad movies . . . Writer-director Amy Holden Jones has written other ridiculous scripts before, including the one for Indecent Proposal, but she directed the laudable Jamie Lee Curtis vehicle Love Letters, so there really is no excuse for the sheer ineptitude of this movie."

Godfrey Cheshire of Variety said, "Thrills have seldom seemed as routine as they do in The Rich Man's Wife, a lady-and-the-psycho yarn so generic it might have been constructed by computer printout . . . Although her script is the source of the film's hackneyed feel, Jones' direction is generally top-drawer. Beyond her work with the supporting cast, she provides a polished, fluid look and proves especially effective at mounting punchy, visceral action scenes."