Review: Alzheimer's drama 'The Artist's Wife' benefits from strong acting and authentic details

The details of the glossy and well-acted drama “The Artist’s Wife” may be a bit odd at times, with its setting among the super-elite of New York artists, but the themes are familiar ones: The push and pull of a relationship between a temperamental artist and the spouse who has repressed her dreams in service to his.

The couple in question here is an acclaimed painter, Richard Smythson (Bruce Dern), and his second wife, Clare (Lena Olin), who share a luxurious modern house in the Hamptons. (Dern’s character has no resemblance to the soundalike Richard Smithson, the “land art” pioneer who created Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake.) Clare has noticed that Richard, who is preparing for what could be his last great gallery exhibition, has become more irascible than usual — though she finds it hard to accept his doctor’s diagnosis, that Richard is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

Faced with a deadline, of getting Richard through his gallery opening before his mind goes too far down for him to paint, Clare sets herself a pair of major tasks. One is to reconcile the distant relationship between Richard and his daughter, Angela (Juliet Rylance), who runs a girls-who-code nonprofit in New York. The other is to rent a barn near the house to rekindle her long-buried passion for painting.

Some of the movie’s peeks into the art world get a little weird, most of them embodied by Clare’s friend Ada, an avant-garde video artist who poses with nude for a photo shoot. Ada is played by Stefanie Powers — yes, from “The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.” in the ‘60s and “Hart to Hart” in the ‘80s — and I’ll say this much about the 77-year-old’s first full-frontal nude scene: It’s very brief and, no lie, not as bad as you might have feared.

Director/co-writer Tom Dolby seems to have been inspired by his parents — the legendary sound engineer Ray Dolby, whose battle with Alzheimer’s ended with his death in 2013, and Ray’s widow, Dagmar — and there are details infused in the story that feel authentic to the experience. The paired performances, by Dern as the painter losing control and Olin as the helpmeet trying to keep him together, have a lived-in quality that put “The Artist’s Wife” a rung or two above the average melodrama.

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‘The Artist’s Wife’

★★★

Available starting Friday, September 25, on the Salt Lake Film Society virtual cinema. Rated R for language, some graphic nudity and brief sexuality. Running time: 96 minutes.