2019 Reviews – Marriage Story

With Marriage Story receiving so many Golden Globe nominations, and since Adam Driver is so hot right now, it was a must that I see Marriage Story before the end of the year. Marriage Story is on Netflix, written and directed by Noah Baumbach. Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) are getting divorced. They promise each other an amicable separation but when the custody of their son Henry (Azhy Robertson) is on the line, it soon devolves into a battle for the lawyers. More than that, Nicole has moved back to Los Angeles, from New York where she lived with Charlie, where she finds a new independence, and Charlie sees the comfortable life he once loved slipping away. He flies back and forth between the two cities to see his son, while juggling work and meeting with lawyers. Whilst there are so many movies out there that embolden the value of love, Marriage Story highlights the financial and emotional cost of divorce, and love is… gross.

Baumbach is a talented writer – his last work, The Meyerowitz Stories, detailed how people can have conversations without really responding to the other person, and here, Baumbach shows how conversations can twist and escalate out of control. Friendly banter between happy people turn into barbs thrown in court proceedings, and misinterpretations can lead to screaming matches. There are scenes with long fluid speech, where actors are encouraged to talk whilst multi-tasking. The movie starts out in an affluent Baumbach home for successful artistic people, but eventually Charlie finds himself renting a small apartment in LA with nothing on the walls. The first half of this movie is scary, and I had a pit in my stomach watching things unravel, slowly and slowly becoming worse for Charlie. At first, Charlie is convinced that Nicole will consider both their best interests, but he quickly realises that the divorce laws can fuck him pretty good if Nicole decides that’s what she wants. The two trade sweet montages of when they were in love with each other at the beginning of the film, but there’s an underlying uneasiness beyond that, that fully explodes in the scene where Charlie first meets his toughest lawyers – these guys make a living at flinging mud, and they make it clear that Charlie’s good boy sensibilities will be to his detriment if the divorce goes to court.

The tension I felt in my stomach went away when Nicole reveals that she knows Charlie had an affair, and that she has concrete motivation to be angry – before that, Charlie’s circumstances seemed unfairly consequential. The most explosive scene of the movie allows Nicole and Charlie to get out all their built-up negative interpretations of their marriage. It’s horrible to hear these people describe the last ten years of their lives as a wasteful mistake, especially when it’s clear they were once a lovingly revered team… I have never been married, nor have I ever had children, but this movie is not a glowing recommendation! Without any experience on the matter, I feel like I empathised with Charlie more, because the movie spends more time with him, but also as a man. That’s not to say Nicole is unreasonable or her concerns are incomprehensible, and I’d be certain if I was a woman, I would have lent more her way. Charlie points out that it’s only now Nicole has decided she has been unhappy, while Nicole calls Charlie a dick for being unable to see how she feels like he always got his way, and how that equates with them living in New York… I think about people as having ‘mental dents’, which is what I call it when a good person has a flawed, lack of understanding on something that would make them better. People also don’t know what they don’t know – Charlie hasn’t had a family life; New York, his friends and autonomy are what he has learnt. For Nicole to factor in her home life amongst her career decisions is not something Charlie has ever been able to contend with. However, being separated from Henry may have led Charlie to finally accepting a residency in LA near the end, and Nicole seems humbled by Charlie’s decision. Throughout the movie, I felt bad for Charlie because he was clear he was never going to win the case to get Henry back to New York. Soz bruh.

It’s a shame that Joker came out this year, and Joaquin Phoenix has such a strong case for the Academy Award for Best Actor, because Adam Driver pulls out every move in the acting manual in an excellent acting performance. I don’t know how he does it, but he continues to find roles where he doesn’t have to smile; that’s a skill all on its own. I think if he reads a script, and he has to turn up the corners of his mouth for more than 5% of the runtime, then goodbye, not for him. Laura Dern grabs hold of some excellent material as well, as Nora, Nicole’s sympathetic and ballsy lawyer – look out for more award nominations for her this season, I’m sure. And Scarlett Johansson matches Driver, as the opposite side of the coin; she doesn’t stand out as boldly for me, but without her the movie doesn’t work – that one long monologue where she’s walking and talking, and thinking, her way through her relationship with Charlie to Nora will get high play.

It’s good to note how Baumbach uses the actors in Charlie’s play to deliver exposition on Charlie and Nicole as time moves on – it’s organically passed off as gossip; quite clever, I appreciated it. I also liked Alan Alda as the shaky-handed lawyer Charlie tries first, and Julie Hagerty is always serviceable as a heart-warming mum. I think Marriage Story is a quasi-judgemental dip at legal process for divorce and how love spoils after the fact. As the movie points out, criminal lawyers see bad people at their best, while divorce lawyers see good people at their worst. I read somewhere once that the only things people ever fight about are love and power, and I kept thinking about that the whole time after Nicole tells how she was suffocated through the marriage. It’s easier said than done, to boil down problems to one of those two ideals though, and remedy it. What’s more normal is to get caught up in circumstance, for emotions to spill over and relationships to fracture. I’m hardly qualified to talk about such things, and a lack of understanding makes Marriage Story an awkward story to watch. However, unmistakably, Marriage Story is a powerfully intelligent drama, even if it left me feeling like I didn’t want a hug for a while afterwards; yuck.

4.5