The director is Swedish native Bjorn L. Runge, whose wife, Lena Runge, served as editor of this self-effacing triumph. Director Runge isn’t a major stylist, and not all the casting’s ideal: Lloyd is serviceable but a bit bland. The shots alternate slow zooms and lateral glides, usually in the direction of Close, with the occasional and somewhat intrusive handheld approach for surface “immediacy.” But Runge is very good with actors. It’s a pleasure simply to watch Close and Pryce establish such minute and careful gradations of happiness, desolation and exasperation in their scenes together. “The Wife” isn’t a two-person show, but it feels like one because these two are so effortlessly interesting. Pryce knows this territory by instinct — he played a Philip Roth-inflected narcissist in “Listen Up Philip,” one of the great comic examinations of the male literary ego in modern American cinema.