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The Rich Man's Wife (1996)
Rate:
4
Viewed:
6/20
6/20:
If you feel sorry for gold diggers who suddenly lost their sugar daddy, then The Rich Man's Wife is the film for you.
Let me digress for a minute here: Priscilla Presley, with the help of a ghostwriter, wrote an autobiography called
Elvis and Me. It became a national bestseller which was made into a telefilm. Twelve years later, Suzanne Finstad
came out with Child Bride: The Untold Story of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley that was both independently researched and
vetted by a law firm, refuting just about everything stated by Priscilla.
The moral is this: never believe somebody's version of how it went down as 100% truth. That's the trouble with
The Rich Man's Wife which begins with a woman telling the cops what happened.
Uh...The Usual Suspects,
anyone? Naturally enough, just as I predicted, she lied at the end, and therefore, the whole film became a sheer waste of time.
The cops letting her go, it's pure manipulation because she confessed to killing Cole, and nobody knows for sure if it was done in
self-defense.
I'm kind of curious here: while the wife was telling her story and it's supposed to be based on what she saw, heard, and
experienced, how would she know what the cops were talking about in the car during surveillance at the funeral? Ditto for
the encounter between Jake and Cole when they were alone.
At one point, the wife ran away from Cole by crossing over the high-traffic highway. So, how did she get back to her SUV which
was parked where she was running away from? I can see Cole sitting there and waiting for her to appear. Earlier, she was
driving her Wrangler until it died in the middle of the woods. All of a sudden, Cole showed up to help her out. Think about
that: coincidence or...planned? While in the garage, at the end of the film, he jumped through the window opening, but why?
In the meantime, the cast is all right, never hitting any point of suspense. Redundantly using her eyes to revive
clichéd moments of terror, Halle Berry wears too much makeup (check out her overlarge sunglasses) and never appears in any
scene without it. Her character should've lawyered up at the beginning after hearing what Cole did to her husband,
but then again, she told her version of the story. At the end, chances are: she'll never get the money, right?
Having a couple of bit parts in films such as The Usual Suspects and
Pulp Fiction, Peter Greene finally gets the
chance to shine in a bigger role. But this time, he looks like a caricature and is better off not having done it.
All in all, Halle Berry later confessed The Rich Man's Wife was the worst film she did.