Review: Military Wives Is a Treacly and Laugh-Starved Brit-Com

The film seems almost content to have you forget about everything that inspired it in the first place.

Military Wives
Photo: Bleecker Street

The titular characters of Peter Cattaneo’s warm-hearted but strictly by-the-numbers Military Wives are all stuck in the same boat. After their husbands are deployed in Afghanistan, the women are left behind at the Flitcroft Garrison military base with little to keep their minds off the dangers their spouses regularly face on the battlefield. As for the war being waged, the airy, inoffensive Military Wives doesn’t really broach the topic, preferring instead to direct its attention toward the activities the wives engage in to help keep the negative thoughts at bay. “We don’t have the privilege of being against the war. We’re married to it,” quips the sprightly Lisa (Sharon Horgan) to an anti-war protester early on—a statement that effectively stands as the film’s only and final word on politics.

What conflict there is in Military Wives is far less dramatic than warfare, and it lies primarily between two women responsible for keeping the worrying wives active: Lisa, who was recently anointed as chair of the base’s social committee and is content to hold low-key coffee klatches and wine parties, and Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas), the company commander’s wife, who urges structure to the group’s activities as a way to give their lives purpose. When the wives start a singing club and Lisa takes the laidback route of letting the women belt out ’80s pop songs with little to no preparation, it’s no surprise that the busybody Lisa steps on her toes every step of the way and forces an organized approach to practice that the women find aggravating, at least until they get an invitation to play at London’s famed Royal Albert Hall.

It’s a classic battle of wills—here between the stick in the mud and the cool but chaotic popular girl—and things more or less unfold as you’d expect, with the group beginning to thrive once Lisa and Kate manage to reach a point of equilibrium. There are a handful of stock characters on hand to jockey for laughs, including the painfully tone-deaf Ruby (Lara Rossi) and the ditzy Maz (Laura Checkley), while others, like the newlywed Sarah (Amy James-Kelly), exist only to tug at the heartstrings. But none of these secondary characters are given a distinctive voice and Cattaneo’s melding of comedy and drama reeks of bet-hedging, with Military Wives neither letting loose long enough to truly bring out our laughter nor lingering on the women’s troubles for too long to develop much dramatic heft.

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There are a few times where the film grapples with the coping mechanisms that drive the women’s behaviors. Lisa’s devil-may-care attitude masks her frustration at having no control over her husband’s fate or her binge-drinking teenage daughter, Frankie (India Amarteifio). And while Kate’s steely demeanor is the antithesis to Lisa’s buoyancy, her tendency to micromanage stems from her emptiness in the wake of her son’s recent death in combat. The tensions between Lisa and Kate build to a surprisingly powerful and raw confrontation late in Military Wives, but the filmmakers are quick to return to the business of conditioning the audience to pablum with their more cheerful, audience-pleasing sequences.

Cattaneo sets a generally congenial tone by employing a peppy score and serving up plenty of upbeat songs for the wives to sing. Just as the singing group was a harmless diversion for the women who joined it, so is the film for its audience. Long before the closing credits sequence, of the cast singing Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” atop footage of real-life military wives choirs, it’s clear that Cattaneo and company are more than happy enough to have you tapping your toes to the music and forgetting about everything that inspired the film in the first place.

Score: 
 Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Sharon Horgan, Emma Lowndes, Gaby French, Lara Rossi, Amy James-Kelly, India Amarteifio, Greg Wise, Jason Flemyng, laura Checkley, Laura Elphinstone  Director: Peter Cattaneo  Screenwriter: Roseanne Flynn, Rachel Tunnard  Distributor: Bleecker Street  Running Time: 113 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2019

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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