An early Christmas together shows the Roses and their young children enjoying a luxury car Barbara has splashed out on, with the assumption that Oliver is destined for greatness. It’s a little bit harder to guess what Barbara (Kathleen Turner), a self-confessed bimbo on a jock gymnastics scholarship, is doing at this auction, having grown up in a state of tacky rusticity.But what’s important is that the two meet under the shared condition of trying to perform cosmetic surgery on their respective images. Oliver (Michael Douglas) is an ambitious Harvard law student whose brains are insufficiently matched by his bankroll,and this perceived dearth of wealth compels him to reach ever higher. In the unfortunate case of the Roses, the motivation for this initial melee is an all-consuming covetous desire for social and personal power, for which all other emotions in their lives turn out to be mere disguises. Oliver and Barbara Rose meet on the battle field, vying for possession of a piece of sexy antique statuary and they will spend the remainder of their lives together repeating this scene in an ongoing escalation of physical and emotional violence that would describe a perfect lifelong bond, if only their names were Gomez and Morticia. ), she becomes possessed by the spirit of a black widow murderess.
In addition to the aforementioned tales of marital and familial terror, for the Spielberg television serial Amazing Stories, DeVito directed himself in a piece in which, after slipping a stolen wedding ring on the finger of real-life wife of 40 years Rhea Perlman (although those bonds of legal matrimony also, now, appear to be coming to an end. Up to and including The War of the Roses, as a portion of DeVito’s directorial filmography, The War of the Roses displayed a distinct slant toward festering domestic disorder. From Throw Momma from the Train to the remorselessly evil It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. DeVito has been plumbing the darkest depths of black comedy from both sides of the camera for much of his forty year career. The man emerged from being simply a lovable grouch on screen some of us even remember him from Sesame Street (albeit in flesh, not felt) to a director and producer of great power and foresight. In fact, the satiny peaks and valleys turn out to be the folds of a handkerchief into which we find Danny DeVito honking his beezer. A typically lovely credit sequence by Saul Bass, comprised of a single rose on a field of folded silk, is the only glimpse of classic Hollywood romance we get in The War of the Roses.
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