The War Of The Roses (1989)

Love and hate can live remarkably close together, especially inside a house two people both refuse to give up. Danny DeVito's "The War of the Roses" reunites him with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, their third film together after "Romancing the Stone" and "The Jewel of the Nile," to brilliant effect. But this dark, disturbing comedy of marital misery and revenge couldn't be more different from their sunnier adventures. Adapted by Michael Leeson from Warren Adler's novel, it stars Douglas and Turner, in career-best performances, as Oliver and Barbara Rose, a materialistic, status-conscious couple whose seemingly perfect marriage has curdled beyond repair. Apart from their two college-bound kids, the only thing they share is their meticulously maintained dream house, which Oliver paid for and Barbara decorated down to the last detail. When Barbara gets a taste of financial independence through her own catering business, she asks for a divorce, and all she wants is the house and everything in it, except his clothes and shaving kit. He laughs at her, and she punches him in the face. Things only get worse from there, as a nasty divorce battle, with DeVito as Oliver's lawyer, who narrates the story as a warning to a prospective client, gives way to insults, threats, sabotaged dinner parties and even cruelty to a family pet. All the while, the Roses start wrecking their beloved home and its treasures just to spite each other. DeVito gives Leeson's pitch-black script a stylized spin, with skewed camera angles and wonderfully expressionistic cinematography by Stephen Burum, as the couple barricade themselves inside the house, neither willing to give an inch. Surprisingly daring for a mainstream studio film, with its unlikable leads, spiraling bitterness and shocking finale, it's a poisonously funny valentine to marriage and 1980s materialism, softened only by its cautionary-tale frame. Definitely not a date movie.