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Long before the relevant authorities do, you’ll figure out the secret that immigrant homemaker Hermine Ryan (née Braunsteiner) holds close to her chest in “The Housewife” — a giveaway that may be the fault of some heavy-handed
direction and scripting, but speaks to the detail and integrity of Naomi Watts’ lead performance, which often seems a step ahead of the film around her. A true story of a Nazi-hunting case in mid-1960s New York City, Ben Shirinian’s debut feature is most absorbing as a character study of a woman lying to herself, at least as much as she’s lying to everyone else. It’s the procedural thriller around her, probing at that deception, that feels undercooked, with neither Tye Sheridan’s investigating journalist nor Michael Imperioli’s immigration officer much of a foil for Watts’ more layered protagonist.
This is ambitious material for a new filmmaker, and while Shirinian (a native of Montreal, where this mostly Queens-set film was shot) directs it with handsome gravity, he has a tendency to double down on signposting that’s already in the script by Alyssa Hill, also a first-timer. Still, with its burnished period production values and tony cast — also including an oddly underused Luke Evans and a briefly potent Lena Olin — this is the kind of older-skewing upscale drama that could do respectable arthouse business outside the awards corridor.
From the start, there’s a nervous brittleness to Hermine’s permanently pasted-on smile, though there could be any number of reasons for that. Having moved to the States with her husband Russell (Evans) after they met in post-WWII Austria, she has lived in New York for nearly a decade, but is aware she doesn’t quite fit in — beginning with her still-strong Germanic accent — and as the film begins, her looming U.S. citizenship interview is causing her much anxiety. But perhaps she frets too much: The local church women have embraced her as one of their own, her oatmeal raisin cookies are much in demand, and when the dreaded interview comes around, she easily impresses official Anthony DeVito (Imperioli) with her earnest-sounding American Dream spiel.
“You can be anyone you want to be,” she says in praise of her new home country — our first, unsubtle clue that everything is not entirely as it appears. When New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld (Sheridan) turns up on her doorstep requesting to speak with her husband, she seems less surprised than you might expect: He hasn’t told her that he’s acting on a tip from famed Austrian Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal (an oddly sidelined figure in the film’s version of events), but perhaps she wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he did.
Shirinian and Hill engage in some labored obfuscation — chiefly by delaying our first encounter with Russell to a suspicious degree — to engineer a narrative twist of sorts, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth: Viewers needn’t be acquainted with the facts of the real-life case to guess the truth well ahead of time, not least because the character of Hermine, and Watts’ simultaneously tricky and disarming playing of her, is so clearly the film’s driving force. A woman whose story, once tested, changes so often you wonder which version she believes, she’s sufficiently interesting to anchor the film without any need for strategized reveals and reversals.
Sheridan’s callow journo, by contrast, never feels like more than an information-gathering device, not helped by the phonily expositional nature of much of his dialogue — which occasionally goes so far as to insult the audience’s intelligence. (“After the war?” he asks gormlessly, when Hermine mentions that she married in 1958.) A suggested ripple of May-December attraction between his and Watts’ characters initially intrigues, but goes largely unexplored. “The Housewife” has little interest in perverse or ambiguous territory as it pivots, in its third act, to a somewhat cursory courtroom drama.
Even Watts’ hitherto finely measured character gradations are suddenly a bit compressed in this denouement, though Olin, as a Holocaust survivor bearing crucial, ugly truths, gets two scenes to quietly burn everything down. Shirinian brings “The Housewife” in at a brisk 102 minutes, though after the coy slow burn of its first hour, the rest could use as much breathing room. Just as the film gets risky, it rushes to the finish line — and away from its most riveting, unreliable perspective. But it’s a welcome reminder of what Watts, who’s been either ill-used or unchallenged in too many of her recent film vehicles, can do with a role that steps up to her adaptable, slightly unknowable screen presence.
