Mark Reviews Movies: MARRIAGE STORY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 14, 2019

The marriage already has fallen apart at the start of Marriage Story, but hearing Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) talking about each other during the film's opening montages, one wouldn't suspect that. The opening minutes of writer/director Noah Baumbach's contain the first and last times we'll hear and see any definitive sense that these two love or even have loved each other. Neither of them gets to hear those sentiments, and that, perhaps more than anything else we learn about the couple, is the problem.

This is a smart film about smart people. It's also a mournful film, not about how a marriage can fall apart, but about how the relationship between two people, who clearly felt strong affection for each other at one point, can be annihilated by the process of divorce. To be clear, there's probably nothing that could have been done here to save this marriage. That, though, doesn't exactly translate into the notion that we wonder if Charlie and Nicole will ever want to speak to each other again by the end of this ordeal.

Baumbach sees and reveals the reasons that the marriage broke down the way it did. He also, wisely, doesn't assign exclusive blame to either party (although one of them certainly did something that started the relationship down its current path).

By the end, we just see two decent but flawed people—almost but not quite broken by the legal process and all of the anxiety that comes along with it—each of whose flaws might have been too in line with the other's. They're both stubborn and aren't exactly the greatest communicators, especially when it comes to matters of career and of the heart. These flaws are only accentuated by the divorce process, and along with them comes uncertainty, resentment, hostility, financial devastation, and more.

The film doesn't mourn the marriage. It mourns how much additional, potentially avoidable pain these two have to endure, just to make the end of that marriage official.

Charlie is a director who runs his own theater, which has become a niche success. Nicole is an actress, who once could have been someone in Hollywood.

We hear the story of how they met much later. It's almost just as we would expect. Nicole came to New York City. She saw one of Charlie's plays. Charlie was instantly smitten with her, and she felt a similar way. There are other details, mainly that Nicole left a fiancé to start a relationship with Charlie and that they were married quite quickly, but such messes and haste could be seen as either warning signs or as signs that things were meant to be.

At this point, none of that history matters. It matters to us, of course. Indeed, we're kind of affectionately amused by those opening montages, in which Nicole says that she loves how much Charlie loves being a father, while Charlie explains how he finds Nicole's tendency to leave clutter around endearing. All of this happens in a room with a mediator, who wants them to say these things to each other before the difficult part begins. Nicole refuses to say hers or to hear Charlie's, because she's still angry at him—and with good reason, as we find out later.

Both respect each other professionally, and that's the only reason Nicole is still in New York. The company is finishing up the run of Charlie's latest play, which is about to go to Broadway, and once that's finished, she's off to her hometown of Los Angeles with the couple's son Henry (Azhy Robertson) in tow. On their last night in the apartment together as a family, the conversation is stilted. Nicole leaves the room to cry, and the family spends one last night in bed as a barely-together unit.

Everything escalates from there, and Baumbach's screenplay continually jumps forward in time to each new complication, each new legal debate, each new crushingly uncomfortable interaction, and each new fight, without providing any sense of time. Just like the couple's history, time becomes meaningless here. It's just one painful moment after another, with no indication that it will ever stop.

After Nicole is the first to act in an official capacity, hiring Nora (Laura Dern), who has a cutthroat reputation in these matters, as her attorney and awkwardly having Charlie served divorce papers when he comes to visit Henry. After looking into hiring his own shark (played by Ray Liotta), Charlie stalls until the last moment, and all of the work he has done to visit his son makes the matter of the couple's residency an issue. There's no winning for either side, because any action from either party can be argued and interpreted in a variety of ways. Charlie is just happy that Bert (Alan Alda), the lawyer he finally hires, treats him like a human being for once in the process.

There is something inherently dehumanizing about all of this. Baumbach only emphasizes that by ensuring that Charlie and Nicole are fully developed characters, whose goals and hopes and frustrations and outbursts are entirely sympathetic.

The lead performances aid that immeasurably. Driver plays Charlie as a bit of a naïve optimist, who is certain that matters will resolve themselves, and a stubborn man who only seems to hear things as they relate to his perspective. Johansson's Nicole has a different kind of stubbornness—in that she's set on having a life of her own now that Charlie's way of thinking mainly about himself is out of the way—and a wealth of pain and frustration about feeling as if her entire life has been dictated for her.

The film plays out almost in vignettes of this process. They're intimate, especially in how Baumbach will stay with one character for a private moment. They're uncomfortable, such as Charlie's attempt to take his son trick-or-treating, after all of the homes have stopped handing out candy. They're honest, such as when Nicole lays out her side of the story to her attorney in a breathless one-take shot. They're painful, especially when Charlie and Nicole have a shouting match in a barren, echo-filled apartment. They're even darkly funny at times, like when Charlie shows off a knife trick and forgets the "trick" part.

They are, above all else, real. Marriage Story wants us to see these people as they are and this process for what it can do, and it hurts.

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