What The Wife gets right, and wrong

Glenn Close is as always terrific in the title role in Bjorn Runge's adaptation of the Meg Wolitzer novel, The Wife, and I have to say I liked this movie more than I thought I would - a tremendously acute and, sad to say, credible portrait of a marriage in distress, with the husband (Jonathan Pryce) playing a famous novelist, Joe Castleman, who has just won a Nobel Prize and who is from the first moment an insufferable egotist and bully, and with Close as the resentful, perhaps jealous, and cranky spouse. But what the film gets right about marital dynamics it gets wrong regarding literature and publishing. Spoilers coming, though they're hardly meant to be stunning surprises, as we can easily see, thanks largely to the flashback scenes, where this narrative is headed: Over time we learn that Joan, not Joe, Castleman has actually written all the novels that have brought Joe the highest level of acclaim and brought both of them a lot of wealth and comfort. How did this come to pass? We see early on that Joan, back in college (Smith, 1958) was told that it would be pointless for her to become a writer, as no woman writer could expect to succeed. Even in 1958, that was ridiculous advice; aside from the challenge that any writer of serious literature had and will always have in getting published and getting a readership, there were plenty of highly successful women writers throughout the 20th century: Cather, Wharton, O'Connor. Welty, McCarthy - just to name a few Americans, and even more in England. Joe - who leaves his teaching post when they marry and move to NYC - is deemed the writer; when he completes the ms of his first novel, she reads it, tells him point blank it "doesn't work," and claims she can "fix it." That in itself is absurd, unless all the ms needs is some heavy editing. Nevertheless, she "fixes" his novel, and it launches his career. The narrative waffles a little on exactly her role: are they writing  partners (his experiences of life in a Jewish immigrant family - aspects of Saul Bellow and maybe Philip Roth here?) or, as suggested later in the film, does she literally do all of the writing, with Joe playing the role of supportive spouse, making tea, backrubs etc. You can only imagine the absurdity of that. No one knows? And why would she keep up this sham? I can imagine it if they were writing some kind of genre fiction - crime novels, for ex. - but even then, why not a pseudonym, or joint authorship? But I can't imagine this for a second at the Nobel level. OK, all that said, the tension in the movie, such as it is, involves an eager literary biographer who figures out the truth and threatens to reveal it all in his book on Castleman. In a final scene, Close threatens him with a lawsuit if he "maligns" Castleman "in any way." Wrong! Any writer would know this is a baseless threat in the U.S., as we still have this thing called the First Amendment that protects freedom of speech and expression.