The “wonderfully sick” movie Michael Douglas loved every second of making
In the late 1980s, Michael Douglas starred in a pitch-black comedy so hilariously vicious that he assumed the studio would force the director to change the ending.
The story of this “wonderfully sick” movie goes back to Douglas and Danny DeVito striking up a great working relationship on 1984’s romantic comedy adventure Romancing the Stone and its ‘85 sequel The Jewel of the Nile.
Those Robert Zemeckis hits cast Douglas as a rugged hero in the Indiana Jones mould, and DeVito as the villainous antiquities smuggler who chases him through the jungle. The female lead in the films was Kathleen Turner, and her on-screen ‘will they, won’t they’ chemistry with Douglas was genuinely goddamn electric. The two projects combined made more than $200million globally, proving that the three stars play off each other was always going to result in a big fucking payday.
Perhaps this is why, only four years later, DeVito got the band back together for The War of the Roses, which the diminutive star planned to star in and direct himself. He had made his directorial debut in ‘87 with Throw Momma from the Train, proving himself a dab hand at realising truly funny comedies with premises so dark that you’d wonder how anyone could find the mirth within them. You see, that movie revolved around a pact between two friends played by DeVito and Billy Crystal, with DeVito promising to kill Crystal’s ex-wife, so long as Crystal agreed to kill DeVito’s domineering mother. Murderous hijinks ensue.
After Throw Momma became a decent-sized hit at the box office, DeVito decided to return to the black comedy arena and somehow managed to find a comedy script with an even dimmer view of humanity. The War of the Roses tells the tale of a rich couple, Oliver and Barbara Rose, whose divorce turns so bitter that they try to ruin each other’s lives, and eventually resort to Looney Tunes-style cartoonish violence. Amusingly, though, when Douglas first read the script, there was one thing he was certain of, even if he thought it was a riot. He was convinced there was no way 20th Century Fox would allow the ending to be shot as it appeared in the screenplay.
After all, in the film’s over-the-top finale, Oliver and Barbara Rose get into a fight that escalates from Barbara pretending she cooked Oliver’s beloved dog and fed it to him, to her loosening their chandelier with the intention of dropping it on his head to kill him once and for all. In the end, though, the two find themselves hanging from the chandelier, which breaks, sending them plummeting to their deaths. With his final breath, Oliver reaches out a dying hand to touch his wife’s shoulder, but with her last breath, she chooses to push it away.
“What a wonderfully sick picture that is,” Douglas grinned while speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2015, “showing how divorce really turns people into animals. When Danny gave me the script, I said, ‘They’re gonna make us change the ending, right?’” To his delight, though, DeVito managed to maintain his vision for the ending, which shows the stark reality of how far a game of marital one-upsmanship can go if emotions run high enough and neither side backs down. “Danny has that dark, sick sense of humour, and he pulled it off,” Douglas marvelled. “It’s one of the great, dangerous, on-the-edge comedies I’ve seen.”
Ultimately, perhaps DeVito was able to get away with such a bleak fucking ending because he added a coda to the film that softens it ever-so-slightly. It is revealed that the tragic tale of the Roses is being told by their lawyer, Gavin (DeVito), to a client who wants to divorce his wife.
In a very un-divorce lawyer move, he suggests the client can still go back to his wife and tell her he loves her, and when he steps out of the office to make that very call to his own wife, it’s implied that the Roses have given him some much-needed perspective on his marriage.
