When Marriage Becomes a Battlefield: The War of the Roses and Its Dark Kin

There’s a moment in The War of the Roses (1989) when you stop laughing. Maybe it’s when Oliver sabotages Barbara’s dinner party, or when she runs over his beloved Morgan with her car. Somewhere in the escalating madness, the comedy curdles into something darker, and you realize you’re watching two people destroy not just their marriage, but themselves. The film doesn’t merely depict a broken relationship—it stages it like gladiatorial combat, with every room a potential arena and every possession a weapon.

The War of the Roses isn’t unique in exploring marital collapse, but it is distinctive in how it does so: through dark comedy, escalating spectacle, and a refusal to pick sides. Director Danny DeVito gives us a house that’s both dream home and death trap, a marriage that transforms from partnership to warfare. But what happens when we shift the lens—when we trade comedy for realism, spectacle for intimacy, mutual destruction for legal negotiation?

Let’s use The War of the Roses as our anchor point and explore how other films—Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Revolutionary Road, Marriage Story, and The First Wives Club—approach the same terrain of marital breakdown. Each film asks the same question: what happens when love dies? But the answers they provide are strikingly different.

The War of the Roses: Architecture as Ammunition

The Roses begin like any ambitious couple: building a life, accumulating beautiful things, creating a showcase home. But when their marriage fractures, that very house becomes the battlefield. Oliver and Barbara fight not just over who gets what, but over the space itself. Each room becomes contested territory; every object, from the chandelier to the ornaments, turns into leverage.

What makes the film so unsettling is its tone. DeVito leans into dark comedy, inviting us to laugh at absurd traps and petty revenges, even as the cruelty intensifies. We’re complicit in our laughter, recognizing the exaggeration while sensing something uncomfortably real beneath it. The escalation is both theatrical and inevitable—once they refuse to leave the house, there’s nowhere to go but toward mutual destruction.

The film’s genius lies in its moral ambiguity. Neither Oliver nor Barbara is the clear villain. Both are petty, vindictive, occasionally sympathetic. Their war isn’t about who’s right; it’s about who can inflict more damage. By the end, when they lie dying on the floor they both refused to surrender, the film offers no redemption, no lesson—just the rubble of what they built together.

This is marriage as external warfare: material, visible, spectacular. But what if the battle moves inward?

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Cruelty as Verbal Torture

Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) trades physical destruction for psychological evisceration. George and Martha’s weapons aren’t booby traps or sabotaged meals—they’re words, memories, and carefully aimed humiliations. Over one long, alcohol-soaked night, they perform their mutual hatred for their guests, turning intimate knowledge into ammunition.

The film is theatrical in the best sense: almost everything happens in confined spaces, with dialogue doing the heavy lifting. George and Martha know exactly where to strike—his failed academic career, her sexual appetites, the fiction of their imaginary son. Each revelation peels back another layer, exposing the lies they’ve constructed to survive their disappointment.

Where The War of the Roses gives us spectacle, Virginia Woolf gives us intimacy. We’re trapped in the room with them, unable to look away as they tear each other apart. The violence here is interior but no less devastating. In some ways, it’s worse—property can be replaced, but the wounds George and Martha inflict are carved into identity itself.

The contrast is instructive: The War of the Roses asks what happens when spouses weaponize their shared material world. Virginia Woolf asks what happens when they weaponize their shared history, their knowledge of each other’s vulnerabilities. Both films understand that marriage creates profound power imbalances—not necessarily between partners, but between the couple and the outside world. When the marriage fails, that shared power turns inward, destructive.

Revolutionary Road: The Quiet Catastrophe

Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road (2008) strips away both the comedy of The War of the Roses and the theatrical intensity of Virginia Woolf. What remains is something closer to documentary realism: the slow, grinding collapse of a marriage under the weight of ordinary disappointment.

Frank and April Wheeler aren’t fighting over houses or hurling insults at dinner parties. They’re struggling with something more insidious: the gap between who they thought they’d be and who they’ve become. April dreams of escape to Paris; Frank is settling into suburban conformity. Their arguments aren’t about possessions or power plays—they’re about identity, possibility, the gradual suffocation of dreams deferred.

The film’s power lies in its accumulation. There’s no single dramatic betrayal, no spectacular showdown. Instead, we watch small failures compound: a job Frank doesn’t really want, a pregnancy April didn’t plan, arguments that start about logistics and end in existential despair. The violence here is incremental, almost invisible, until suddenly it’s catastrophic.

Where The War of the Roses makes marital warfare into spectacle, Revolutionary Road shows how marriages more commonly fail: not through dramatic conflict but through quiet erosion. The weapons aren’t traps or insults but expectations, unspoken resentments, the daily compromises that eventually hollow out intimacy. By the film’s tragic end, we understand that the Wheelers didn’t destroy their marriage in any single moment—they let it die by degrees.

Marriage Story: The Bureaucracy of Heartbreak

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019) brings us into the contemporary moment, where marital breakdown isn’t just personal but procedural. Charlie and Nicole aren’t just ending their relationship—they’re navigating custody agreements, support payments, competing lawyers, and the question of which coast their son will call home.

The film’s innovation is its dual perspective. Baumbach gives us extended scenes from both Charlie’s and Nicole’s viewpoints, showing how each has legitimate grievances and genuine pain. Charlie isn’t a villain for prioritizing his New York theater company; Nicole isn’t selfish for wanting to reclaim her career in Los Angeles. They’re two people whose paths have diverged, and the marriage has become the obstacle.

What’s remarkable is how Marriage Story balances empathy with unflinching honesty about how divorce works. The lawyers—Laura Dern’s sharp strategist and Ray Liotta’s aggressive bulldog—aren’t cartoon villains. They’re professionals doing their jobs, even as those jobs require framing the narrative in increasingly adversarial terms. The film understands that modern divorce isn’t just emotional—it’s institutional, governed by laws and norms that can amplify conflict even when both parties want to minimize it.

Compared to The War of the Roses, Marriage Story is almost clinical in its attention to process. There’s no house explosion, no elaborate revenge. Instead, there’s paperwork, negotiations, small cruelties that emerge from exhaustion and hurt. The pain is no less real for being undramatic. If anything, the film’s restraint makes it more devastating—this is what heartbreak looks like when you’re trying to do it right, and discovering that there’s no painless way to disentangle two lives.

The First Wives Club: Revenge as Reinvention

The First Wives Club (1996) flips the script entirely. Where the other films focus on the collapse itself—the moment when love turns to hatred or indifference—this film asks what comes after. Brenda, Elise, and Annie have already been betrayed, discarded by husbands who traded them for younger women. The question isn’t whether their marriages are over, but what they’ll do with their freedom.

The tone is buoyant, even triumphant. Yes, there’s revenge—schemes to reclaim money, expose hypocrisy, level the playing field—but the real story is about solidarity and reclamation. The women support each other, transforming private humiliation into collective power. Where The War of the Roses ends in mutual annihilation, The First Wives Club moves toward reconstruction.

This shift matters. The film acknowledges the pain of betrayal but refuses to dwell in it. Instead, it asks: what if the end of a marriage isn’t an ending at all, but a beginning? What if the person you become after divorce is stronger, more autonomous, more connected to real friendship than you were in the marriage?

The comedy here serves a different function than in The War of the Roses. DeVito’s comedy is dark, revealing the cruelty beneath civilized surfaces. The First Wives Club uses comedy as catharsis—a way to reclaim agency, to laugh at the absurdity of the situation rather than be destroyed by it. The film is less morally ambiguous, more straightforward: the husbands were wrong, the women deserve better, and they’re going to make sure they get it.

What Style Reveals About Marriage

These films form a constellation around the same black hole: the end of marriage. But the trajectories are wildly different, shaped by tone, perspective, and what each director believes about love and power.

The War of the Roses treats marriage as property dispute, turning intimate knowledge into tactical advantage. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? sees marriage as performance, with cruelty as the script both partners know by heart. Revolutionary Road understands marriage as expectation management, slowly crushed under the weight of ordinary life. Marriage Story frames marriage as contract—legal, emotional, logistical—that requires careful dissolution. The First Wives Club recasts marriage’s end as potential liberation, painful but survivable.

The tonal choices aren’t just aesthetic—they’re philosophical. Dark comedy, like in The War of the Roses, lets us maintain distance even as we’re drawn into the horror. We can laugh because it’s exaggerated, even though we recognize the emotional truth beneath. Realism, like in Revolutionary Road, strips away that buffer, forcing us to sit with discomfort. Legal procedural, like in Marriage Story, reminds us that divorce happens in institutions as much as hearts.

And those choices about where the violence lives—in property, in words, in silence, in paperwork—reveal different theories about what marriage actually is. Is it primarily about shared material life? Shared history and secrets? Shared dreams? Shared children and logistics? Each film finds the marriage in a different place, so when it dies, the death looks different too.

The Question of Sympathy

Perhaps most tellingly, these films differ in how they distribute our sympathy. The War of the Roses refuses to let us side with either spouse—they’re equally monstrous, equally pitiable. Virginia Woolf makes us complicit in George and Martha’s cruelty, disgusted by them but unable to look away. Revolutionary Road asks us to understand both Frank and April, even as they fail each other. Marriage Story works hard to balance the scales, giving equal time to both perspectives. The First Wives Club makes the choice simple: we’re on the women’s side.

These aren’t just storytelling choices—they’re moral positions about whether marital breakdown has villains and victims, or whether it’s more complicated than that. They ask whether we can be sympathetic to people behaving badly, whether context excuses cruelty, whether good intentions matter when the outcome is pain.

Why We Watch

Why do these films captivate us? Perhaps because marriage is one of our most common yet mysterious institutions—we all know married people, many of us are or have been married, yet the interior of someone else’s marriage remains fundamentally unknowable. These films offer glimpses behind the curtain, showing us what happens when the performance of partnership drops.

There’s also something about watching relationships unravel that feels like studying a crash in slow motion. We see the mistakes accumulating, the small choices that become irreversible, the moments when one person could have reached out but didn’t. It’s both warning and reassurance: warning about how easily things can go wrong, reassurance that we’re not alone in finding marriage difficult.

And maybe there’s a darker appeal too: permission to acknowledge that love isn’t always enough, that sometimes people who once cherished each other become strangers or enemies. In a culture that romanticizes marriage, these films offer the counter-narrative—not cynical exactly, but honest about how hard it is to sustain intimacy across time, change, and disappointment.

The Invitation

So here’s my challenge: watch The War of the Roses and then Marriage Story back to back. Notice where your sympathy lies. Do you prefer the dark comedy that lets you laugh at the horror, or the restrained realism that makes you sit in it? Do you want to see the house destroyed, or do you want to see the careful negotiation of who gets what?

There’s no right answer. But the difference matters. Because how we tell stories about marriage’s failure reveals what we believe about marriage’s purpose—whether it’s primarily about passion or partnership, autonomy or merger, til death or til it no longer serves both people. These films, taken together, suggest that marriage is all of these things and none of them, as various as the people who enter into it.

The War of the Roses ends with Oliver and Barbara dying on their beautiful marble floor, still reaching for each other in the final moment—not quite reconciliation, but not quite hatred either. It’s an ambiguous ending for an ambiguous institution. And maybe that’s the most honest thing we can say about marriage: it’s complicated, it’s fragile, and sometimes, despite our best efforts, it becomes a battlefield where there are no winners, only casualties.