Marriage Story. Image courtesy of Netflix.
Marriage Story has a great opening hook. Two quick-cutting montages, sometimes looking at the same trait or interaction from different perspectives, of Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver cataloging the ins and outs of their marriage. Then, the reveal: these are letters they wrote to each other as they begin the process of divorcing, in order to get off on a positive note. This is not a portrait of a happy functional marriage, but one that is ending. And that is the film we are watching: Kramer vs Kramer, the millennial redux. What’s clever about this opening is not just the misdirect; but it also pretty cleanly and efficiently establishes all the context for the film without banging you over the head with it.
The film is semi-autobiographical, as Noah Baumbach also split from his actress wife Jennifer Jason Leigh in 2010, presumably for similar reasons. In Marriage Story, Driver plays an avant garde New York theater director and his wife is an actress who is increasingly feeling lost as his work, and controlling personality, swallows her life. She takes their son and goes to Los Angeles to pursue a pilot, with Driver assuming they will return to New York when the show is not picked up. Instead, she files for divorce in California and sets off an escalating legal war that is meant as a pretty harsh criticism of the way American courts treat divorces.
As I’ve written before, Noah Baumbach does not make films about people who are easy to relate to. His characters are usually upper-crust artistic types whose problems seem rather small and trivial when compared to, say, trying to put food on the table as a working class person. Their little squabbles and problems (how to spend a MacArthur Genius grant, for instance) could in lesser hands come off as trite or even insultingly bourgeois.
But Baumbach’s true skill, in my opinion, is mining these often unsympathetic, distant, unrelatable characters for some deeper human quality. And his pull is such that he gets top notch actors, who can nail these very subtle parts that would be totally lost with less talented performers. In Marriage Story, the script is very nuanced and depicts the process of acrimonious divorce the way it really is - the two-sided collapse of a relationship, with no one single party responsible for everything.
The film doesn’t take sides, but goes to great lengths to show how each party in their own mind feels they are in the right and the complex emotions and thought processes that underpin the dissolution of a marriage. They both have fairly defensible reasons for feeling the way that they do about the situation, and it’s also easy to see how the marriage just kind of came apart over time through no real fault of anyone’s. If there is a villain to be had in this film, it is certainly the legal system where lawyers prey on people are their lowest points in life.
And yet Marriage Story also shows that while they are bringing their marriage to an end, they are still bound together by years of shared life, and a son, and a certain affection and closeness that transcends the process of divorce. Not all divorces are like this, of course, but many are. The marriage spins apart because of irreconcilable personality differences or divergent career paths or casual neglect or entropy or some combination; yet there is a shared and enduring bond that is not so easily broken. That all of this deep emotional and human complexity is distilled to its essence and conveyed in a two hour movie which manages to be at times sad, funny and illuminating and it is really, very impressive.
This was a fantastic film. And of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention that Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson (and of course Laura Dern) absolutely kill it. If they didn’t, the film wouldn’t work at all. I’ve still yet to see The Squid and the Whale, but so far this is my favorite Baumbach film.