Marriage Story (2019)
dir. Noah Baumbach
Rated: R
image: ©2019 Netflix
The centerpiece of director Noah Baumbach’s searing Marriage Story is the kind of scene you might guess would be at the heart of any movie about a disintegrating marriage. It’s a fight. Husband Charlie and wife Nicole are in the bowels of the painful negotiations involving who gets what in the divorce, the most important of which is custody of their young son, Henry. The fight takes place in Charlie’s newly leased apartment; the apartment is a way to show the court that the New York theatre director is serious about being close to his son, who is staying with Nicole in Los Angeles.
This vicious argument between Charlie and Nicole thankfully takes place without Henry being present. It starts as an amicable conversation, and in a parallel to the rest of their divorce process, quickly spirals out of control. As humans often do when they are at their worst, the two begin hurling whatever insults will hurt each other the most. Baumbach and his editor, Jennifer Lame, accentuate the escalating emotions by cutting between tighter and tighter close-ups on each character as the argument gets more intense. It culminates in one person screaming that they wish the other would die. It’s an emotionally charged confrontation that frankly left me a bit shaken.
The whole of Marriage Story left me a bit shaken. This is a movie that feels steeped in verisimilitude. There’s a reason for that. Baumbach presumably took most of the inspiration for his screenplay from his own bitter divorce from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh in 2010 – like Charlie and Nicole, Baumbach and Leigh have one son together. The director also credits his own parents’ divorce as well as several friends’ dissolving relationships as material for the movie. Baumbach claimed in an interview that he showed Marriage Story to Leigh, and that she liked it “a lot.”
Baumbach’s story is heartfelt and moving and his direction is masterful, but like his other films, Marriage Story thrives on the characters and the actors portraying them. The work he has done here with his two leads, Scarlett Johansson as Nicole and Adam Driver as Charlie, is possibly the most fruitful of his career, outside of maybe his work with his current romantic partner, Greta Gerwig. Their delightful collaboration on 2013’s Francis Ha is a great example.
Driver and Johansson in Marriage Story both deliver emotionally complex, pulverizing performances.
There is a scene early in the film where Nicole is describing to her divorce lawyer the trajectory of her relationship with Charlie. Baumbach wrote an extended soliloquy here, one for which any actor would kill. Johansson plays it with the utmost delicacy. She slowly moves through a full spectrum of emotions just as Nicole nervously moves around the room as she tells the story of the breakdown of her marriage. There’s a richness and depth to Johansson’s performance that makes the impact of the story hit that much harder.
Driver plays Charlie as a man who keeps his emotions roiling under the surface, but who also occasionally lets them boil over and explode. We never doubt that Charlie loves his son, but Driver makes us feel just how much Charlie’s career is competing with his son for his attention. That’s the most cutting thing that Nicole lobs at Charlie during the divorce, that he’s completely self-absorbed and thinks only of his career. Driver is a masterful enough actor that he can convey the hurt that that accusation causes while also acknowledging it’s (at least partial) validity.
The way the movie treats Nicole and Charlie is a major strength of Baumbach’s writing. It would have been easy for his movie to side with Charlie – especially considering what Baumbach presumably poured of his own personal experience into the project. While it’s slightly more focused on Charlie (I’d call it 55%-45%), Marriage Story really is about both of them. Baumbach makes Nicole (with the help of Johansson’s performance) a fully realized character. We come to understand her goals and desires as well as Charlie’s. She has a career, too, as an actress, that matters to her just as much as Charlie’s directing work in the theatre.
Nicole put her successful movie career on hold to star in Charlie’s stage productions, but once she realized he wasn’t willing to make the same compromises for her, their relationship began to falter. The issue of suspected infidelity on Charlie’s part didn’t help matters. So, when Nicole is offered a television series back in L.A., she sees it as an escape hatch, and the bi-coastal custody battle begins.
Baumbach takes expert aim at the entire divorce process, and divorce lawyers in particular. It is devastating to see anodyne statements or actions – Nicole mentioning having a glass of wine before putting Henry to bed; Charlie not properly strapping Henry’s car seat into a rental car – weaponized by their lawyers in the most rancorous court scene of the film. In the ugly battle to win at all costs, the lawyers use those examples as a way to portray Nicole as an irresponsible drunk and Charlie as a negligent father.
While a movie that focuses on contentious divorce proceedings, which includes a custody battle, is as heart wrenching as you might expect, Baumbach’s film is also surprisingly funny at times. Most of the humor comes from his phenomenal supporting cast.
Laura Dern is pitch perfect as Nora Fanshaw, Nicole’s lawyer. Dern embodies the stereotypical L.A. lawyer with both wit and grit. Nora is accommodating, and you get the feeling that her empathy towards Nicole is just an act, but when the time comes, she goes straight for Charlie’s throat in court. Ray Liotta is also wryly comical as Jay Marotta, one of the two lawyers that Charlie hires.
The biggest laughs come from stalwart character actor Merritt Wever as Nicole’s sister, Cassie. At one point, Nicole asks Cassie to be the one to serve Charlie with the divorce papers – the law forbids the person filing the papers to serve them to the other party. The way Wever plays Cassie’s discomfort at having to perform this awkward act is brilliant. Wever effectively steals the movie for five minutes when Cassie attempting to give Charlie the papers turns Marriage Story momentarily into a farce.
Only once during the film does Baumbach go too far with visual metaphor. In one scene, Charlie and Nicole meet so that Charlie can pick up Henry for the day. Henry doesn’t want to go, which hurts Charlie. As Charlie takes Henry’s hand to pull him toward the car, Henry grabs Nicole with his other hand. The parents look at each other, Henry literally caught in the middle. It’s a bit too on-the-nose, but it’s a fleeting moment that I can easily forgive.
Marriage Story is an emotionally devastating study of what the end of love can, and often does, look like. Baumbach is in top form with both his story and direction. Adam Driver and Scarlet Johansson use his material to deliver two of the most nuanced and genuine performances of 2019.
Why it got 4 stars:
There are moments of Marriage Story that are brutal. There are moments of Marriage Story that are hilarious. Baumbach’s film focuses on the full width and breadth of human emotions when it comes to the end of love and the breakup of a marriage. The performances from Johansson and Driver are spectacular.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- We see snippets of Charlie’s plays throughout the movie. I couldn’t help but read them as satirical takes on “important theatre.”
- Charlie is seen watching a couple different movies on TV throughout Marriage Story. The Money Pit (in which the attempt to restore a dilapidated house nearly ruins the marriage of characters played by Tom Hanks and Shelley Long) and Legend are among them. If I could get an interview with Baumbach, the first thing I would ask would be for him to expound upon the meaning of those movie choices.
- I only mentioned a few of the great cameos/supporting performances within the movie. Alan Alda plays a grandfatherly type lawyer who seems out of his depth when it comes to battling with Laura Dern’s character. Wallace Shawn turns up in just a few scenes as one of the players in Charlie’s theatre company. Julie Hagerty plays Nicole’s mother. And in the most surprising cameo, the voice of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Robert Smigel, is in the first scene, playing Charlie and Nicole’s mediator in their separation.
- That open, where Charlie and Nicole are reading the letters the mediator has suggested they write, which lists what they love about each other, is so endearing. At least it is until we realize it’s a ruse. Suddenly we realize we are at the end of a relationship, and Nicole refuses to read her letter to Charlie.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Netflix is winning the battle. I did not encounter any people this time around, because I wasn’t in a movie theater. I watched this one in the comfort of my own home. Well, I encountered one person, Rachel, who was sniffling noticeably by the end of the movie.