Marriage Story – Review

Marriage Story – Now on Netflix

“Marriage Story” is a 2019 contemporary American comedy-drama film written and directed by Noah Baumbach. The film stars Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, Azhy Robertson, Julie Hagerty, Matthew Shear and Merritt Wever.

The title of the film is a bit of a misnomer. Running 2:16 the film is largely about the divorce of a young couple named “Charlie Barber” (Adam Driver) and his wife “Nicole” (Scarlett Johansson), his actress wife and former teen star. “Charlie” in his own right is a successful theater director in New York City where he is currently producing a play that stars his wife “Nicole”. But in the opening scene we can already see the couple experiencing marital troubles. To their credit they try to be adults to the apparent inevitable dissolution of their marriage. The try on their own to resolve issues of child custody and financial problems in a fair and amicable away with a licensed marriage mediator. But the mediator's suggestion to keep writing down what they like about one another does not work for either of them. They are stuck emotionally and right where they were before.

Meanwhile, “Nicole” is suddenly offered a starring role in a television pilot in Los Angeles. So, she decides to leave the theater company to temporarily live with her mother in West Hollywood, taking the couple’s young son Henry with her. Charlie elects to remain in New York, as the play is in the process of moving to Broadway. When he flies out to Los Angeles to visit his family, he is surprisingly served with divorce papers. And despite the couple’s agreement to split amicably foregoing the use of lawyers, Nicole has already hired whip smart savvy family lawyer Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), who urges her to pressure “Charlie” into lawyering up himself, resulting in Charlie meeting with “Jay Marotta” (Ray Liotta), a brash and expensive lawyer who urges Charlie to fight dirty.  

REVIEW: It’s rumored that Director Noah Baumbach supposedly based this story on his real life divorce from actress Jennifer Jason-Leigh (i.e. the crazy redneck character “Daisy Domergue” in Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight”).  If it is a real recounting of both his marriage and divorce then it was clearly both a cathartic heartwarming and equally heartbreaking experience filled with joy and pain in-between. It’s one thing to live through that kind disruptive experience it’s another thing altogether to put it to pen and paper and then place it up on a giant digital screen for theater audiences worldwide to see.  And yet he did it and in my opinion has delivered easily an Oscar Nominating worthy film for 2019.

With an exceptional screenplay (Oscar nomination worthy) the story takes you on a deeply emotional path similarly like being slowly wrapped inside a tightly bound of string of perpetual personal devastation and brokenness while still trying to being even-handed and empathetic with one another for the sake of wanting the best for their child. A child that keeps both the husband and wife symbiotically connected to one another no matter if some fancy lawyered up legal up worded paper says they are divorced.

Baumbach also makes his film very even handed in his approach as he never takes any cheap shots into making one side more demonstrable the cause for the failure and divorce then the other. This “Marriage Story” shows while we typically think of any legal matters as having someone winning and someone losing, it’s clear that going through a divorce always makes both parents feeling like some kind of common street criminal. And inspite of all of the mutual best efforts to being fair to one another; any attempts to trying to remember the ephemeral euphoric reasons they got married in the first place, when a marriage goes bad it’s like living endlessly in some realm of absolute craziness. No matter how many well intended perfunctory conversations they initially have with another the flood of buried, latent and dormant bitterness invariably comes to the surface to projectile stab each other with.

Laura Dern and Alan Alda give great supporting performances as the competing lawyers. I particularly appreciated how they both played not only their respective legal counsels completely immersed into the expensive, tricky and mind altering nuanced details of state divorce laws.  I also especially enjoy how they delicately balanced being the best lawyer for them as well as being some type of “Oprah-esque” personal confidant and friend. But it is Laura Dern’s work here that is stellar and in my opinion you can almost justify Fed-Ex-ing her winning the Academy Oscar as Best Supporting Actress now.

In addition, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are both certain to garner Oscar nominations respectfully as Best Actor and Best Actress with Driver having the better chance of walking way with the Best Actor Award Oscar next February.

“Marriage Story” as painful as it is to hear these two people verbally joust, then cajole, then self-imploded and then cajole with one another to eventually cry with one another. It’s clear it is hard to mutually agree that you both know you don’t love each other anymore. This film (as a lifelong bachelor) enlighten me to thinking marriage can be like kind of like ice skating with a partner you love dearly hand in hand. Not on some flat even surface but on a slight curved hill………….It can exhilarating, fun, loving and rewarding as long as you stay close to one another at the top and locked hand in hand, but if you don’t pay attention to the details – to be vigilantly careful with the person you are skating with, you might just get too close to the steeply sloped slippery edge. It can be potentially devastating no matter how much you try to regain your balance, no matter who fast you are moving  and no matter how much you flail your arms as you go down the side......... Its always going hurt when you reach the bottom.

I personally have seen six really good films about divorce in my life time. The dramas “Kramer vs Kramer”, “Boyhood”, “Separation” (an Iranian film), “Carol” , “Blue Valentine” and the slightly more comical turn in “Crazy Stupid Love”……………..You can count “Marriage Story” as luck number seven.

4:00 Stars