‘The Subject Was Roses’: Navigating love’s thorns

Debuting on May 25, 1964, on Broadway — starring Jack Albertson and Martin Sheen — it garnered the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the 1965 Tony Award for Best Play, and the Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

Little wonder. It’s an incredible piece of work.

The 1968 film adaptation — starring Patricia Neal, Albertson, and Sheen, with screenplay by Gilroy — while a bit of a mismatch between stage and cinema technique, as Roger Ebert wrote (though “Oscar” thought otherwise), is equally compelling.

The roses symbolize Valentine’s Day. And with the roses come the thorns.

Some of the dialogue is brutally frank, but it makes the point. Meantime, grace is flowing in this devoutly Catholic family, the only way the love of a man and a woman — polar opposites, occupying planets Venus and Mars — can endure.

And “Vive la difference!”  As the song introducing the film, Sandy Denny's “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” sung by Judy Collins, underscores, “I am not alone when my love is near me."

As the film opens, it’s the start of a new day after a raucous Welcome Home party. Nettie, just waking, looks around at the disarray, imaging her marriage. Twenty-one-year-old Timmy, played by Sheen, is just home from the World War II, where he served since age 18 as a U.S. Army Corporal in the European theatre.

Now he is in the theatre of the long-running war between his parents.

“I’m going to stop off at St. Francis for a prayer of thanks,” John announces as he walks into the kitchen. “All those casualties, he never got a scratch. We’re very lucky.”

Over breakfast, John proclaims, “It was a baby who left. It’s a man who came back.”

John sees how Nettie is a little too bonded with Timmy while also realizing she resents his bonding with their newly independent son. She fears John’s bad habits — too fond of alcohol and women not his wife — will taint their son. Yet for all his weakness, John is a good breadwinner with a strong faith, albeit unable to express himself emotionally and apt to seek consolations that undercut his marriage.

After Timmy comes out and jousts with his father, John reiterates his plan to give thanks at St. Francis and off he goes.

Making breakfast, Nettie frets that Timmy doesn’t remember waffles are his favorite. With the waffles sticking to the iron, nothing is going right in this long-planned homecoming and she erupts in anger, which Timmy defuses. Telling her, all those years away, he longed to dance with her, he quickly turns the radio to dance tunes and they have a grand time — something Sheen had fretted about in real life, given the three debilitating strokes Patricia had suffered three years earlier, causing loss of mobility and speech. But she does just fine.

Just as they are dancing, John comes back. He’s ditched his important business meeting, announcing: “I came out of St. Francis and started for the subway. I was halfway there when I thought of Mr. Freeman. What wouldn’t he give to have a day with his son.”   

He’s taking Timmy to the lake house — an outing Nettie had suggested, though she loathes the lake house.

Once there, father and son have a beautiful heart-to-heart:

“You know I didn’t think you would make it,” John says. “Neither did I,” says Timmy... “No, it wasn’t a miracle,” John says. “We just underestimated you. Especially me.”

That morning, he complained that Nettie overestimated him.

As they are returning home, Timmy buys roses for his mother and suggests his father say they are from him.

Nettie, so moved by this faux gesture, cries tears of joy. Then she wants to establish the schedule for Sunday 10 a.m. Mass. John has another idea. He wants to get romantic.  

The tensions rise. She can never forget or forgive his infidelity and Venus wants to talk it through with Mars: “When you brought the roses, I felt something stirring I thought was dead forever.” 

He continues pressing and, frustrated he refuses to cauterize her wounded heart, she crashes the ceramic vase with the roses to the floor, prompting him to reveal they were not his idea.

The film cuts to breakfast the next morning and a banal conversation about coffee and contention over the lake house.  

Then, out comes Timmy. He’s thinking of taking a pass on Mass, telling his father, “I haven’t considered myself a Catholic for a long time.”

“So you’ve outgrown … your faith,” he says, pushing back and noting, “The Clearys have been Catholic since the beginning of time and now, you’re going to say you’re nothing.”

“I believe in the Father and Son and Holy Ghost,” says John, who asks his son if he believes in God. “Yes or no?”

When pressed, Timmy says, “I believe in something bigger than myself.”

“Yesterday you said he was a man,” says Nettie. “A man has a right to decide such things as himself.”

“I’m the boss in the house,” says John insisting Timmy attend Mass.

Nettie tells Timmy to ignore John. Instead, Timmy says, “OK, Papa. I’ll go to Mass with you.”

“Forget it,” says John. “The Lord doesn’t want anybody in his House who has to be dragged there. And, score another one for her side.”

Au contraire. Timmy realizes “'The alliance,’ he called us… ‘Two against one’” has “been going on for 20 years… (and) “We’ve got to stop ganging up on him… Have you ever really tried seeing things from his point of view?”

He’s cutting too close to the nerve and she readies her exit, saying nothing.

“Will you please say something?”

“Thank you for the roses.”

While she’s gone all day, a family tragedy is revealed and how the night it occurred Timmy had finally gotten his father to admit he “loved” his mother.

Poignance overflowing.

Nettie finally returns and after all the fighting and all the hurt — emotional wounds now laid bare — the growth is apparent for all to see, when, after dispatching their son to be a real man, they are back, once again, to talking about coffee — too strong, too weak, too cold — as life, and growth, goes on.