what was up with the wife?


I found this movie to be fairly clever and interesting but I watched it while doin somethin else on my pc.So maybe I just missed something but why did the wife wanted to frame him? It didnt seem about money so was it because of jealously or was it some kind of gettin back to him?

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"I found this movie to be fairly clever and interesting but I watched it while doin somethin else on my pc.So maybe I just missed something but why did the wife wanted to frame him? It didnt seem about money so was it because of jealously or was it some kind of gettin back to him?"

Hard to tell.

At some points...you want to believe the wife wants him back. Like how she says "she doesn't want a divorce...haha just kidding" - "let's go on a date...haha just kidding"

I think she just *said* she was kidding and halfway meant it. She said she was kidding to play the situation off.

She's also a drunk though. So what can you trust that she says?

At the end...she says she still loves him, but is that only to get him to say she didn't have anything to do with what happened? Seems to be the case.

But she does other stuff. My sense was it wasn't *just* to mess with him. She calls him at 3 am because she's lonely in the city. She makes up having to find her passport (which wasn't in the box, if you notice, she slyly pulls it out of a pocket).

I think she wanted his life to fall apart so he'd have to come back to her. Obviously, the murder was never going to stick (the bloated corpse they found wasn't the guys). But it was enough to lose him his promotion, have him suspended, lose the few friends he had.

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She also mentions that Robert seems cursed, like a poison to her. She seemed damaged, but whether you can blame this on Robert or not, I don't know. Did she feel she had to get away from him through divorce? Afterwards she was still drawn to him so I suppose she did still love him. All we can conclude is that she loved him, but felt she had to live away from him and this resulted in her increasingly absurd manipulation and deviance.
What was Robert's feelings toward her? He didn't instigate the divorce. He was clearly fond of her and upset by it all. He says that he fell for an image of her, standing, looking at a painting. It was downhill from there. Any involvement with women appears to end tragically for Robert and this includes the doctor who he avoided dating (she seems distant and cold when they next meet at the hospital under tragic circmstances). Maybe he was avoiding dating because he knew he was somehow cursed. Who knows? Many questions. Fine film, though.


Another thing I noticed is that Thraves changed Nicky's surname from the original novel to Grace. He didn't change any other character's name. I wonder if this is a reference to the David Lynch film 'INLAND EMPIRE', in which there is a main character called Nikki Grace (sic).



"This sounds like a dialogue from our script!"

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the wife was just a mind fck. she knew how to push his buttons.

and thanks for clarifying about the doctor in the hospital. now i get that scene.

Swing away, Merrill....Merrill, swing away...

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[deleted]

What was up with the wife was a bad script. The filmmakers never took the time to construct a realistic motive for her to do what she did. There are any number of standard options they could have chosen (money, jealousy, revenge for some past act, a dark family secret that implicates the husband in some way) but instead they decided to leave that out thus rendering the entire film pointless.

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Thank You! Someone finally gets it...there is nothing to get in this film, it is just a mess.

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Apparently she hated him so much that she couldn't let the divorce be the end of it. She wanted to make sure that he was totally broken and his life destroyed even after the divorce. Some twisted feeling that she thought he had to be punished for what he'd done to her.

A heart can be broken, but it still keeps a-beatin' just the same.

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Apparently she hated him so much that she couldn't let the divorce be the end of it. She wanted to make sure that he was totally broken and his life destroyed even after the divorce. Some twisted feeling that she thought he had to be punished for what he'd done to her.

Yes. Thank you. That's what I got out of it and that mentality isn't all that far fetched in the real world.

It was an ugly divorce. The movie doesn't really need to feed us any more insight into it. I picked that up just by the hurtful comments she was making at the hearings. She wanted to play with his emotions and make him more bitter. The divorce just isn't enough for some people. They want to keep "hitting 'em where it hurts." She claimed that she felt she was "poisoned" by her ex-husband, she wanted to dish out as much agony at him as possible and rub his nose in it at the same time.

Also, the way he was kinda acting like "whatever, lets get this over with" probably angered her and drove her to go even further with the maliciousness.

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Typical ex. During divorce it's not unusual for the ex-wife to try to her husband fired, put in jail, killed.

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