Movie Reaction: Marriage Story

Formula: Kramer vs. Kramer * The Squid and the Whale - Greenberg

I've always been a little hesitant about Noah Baumbach as a filmmaker. Almost on accident, I've managed to see nearly all of his movies. The thing I liked most about him for a while was that he worked with Greta Gerwig (Greenberg, Frances Ha, Mistress America). She humanized a lot of his work. He has a tendency to write insufferable characters. Gerwig is so innately likable as a performer, that she endeared me to characters despite their flaws. She's not in Baumbach's debut movie Kicking and Screaming back in 1995, but that movie has other rough edges that make how I feel about his characters secondary. The key movies going into Marriage Story are The Squid and the Whale (also about a divorce) and The Meyerowitz Stories (his next most recent movie). I hated The Squid and the Whale, which felt like a mean-spirited therapy session that I was being forced to sit through. I hated all the characters and suffered through that movie. That made me less than excited to hear that Baumbach was making another movie about a divorce. However, The Meyerowitz Stories was encouraging. He found ways to make prickly characters without turning me off or having Gerwig as a safety net. Thankfully, Marriage Story is much more like The Meyerowitz Stories.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to get into the internet debate that everyone is having about this movie: Whose fault is it? Consider yourself warned. Marriage Story begins with Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) already decided to get a divorce. She's an actress. He's a theater director. They have a kid and work together. It's all somewhat civil (and, not surprisingly, autobiographical for Baumbach). They are determined to make this divorce as easy as possible since they seem to have no ill will toward each other. Then, Nicole goes to Los Angeles to shoot a pilot that gets picked up to series, and thus begins the death march. Despite all their efforts, the divorce proceedings get contentious and expensive. They each bring in pricey lawyers (Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta) and feelings are hurt.

There's an inherent imbalance to the story. Charlie makes the marriage awful. Nicole makes the divorce awful. The problem is, the movie is only about the divorce. That's the entire divide in a nutshell. And, it's the difference between showing vs. telling. Charlie was clearly stubborn in the marriage. He didn't listen to what Nicole wanted. He was unfaithful at some point. I can understand why she'd want to leave him. In the movie, we mostly hear about all that. Meanwhile, Nicole clearly escalates the divorce. She moves the kid across the country, hires a lawyer, and hides behind legalities to avoid discussions. We see the strain this puts Charlie under in the movie. Seeing is more powerfully than telling. This makes the overall story a little less interesting. I would've liked the imbalances and escalations to be a little more discrete. Since we're mainly seeing the struggles Charlie is going through, it's harder to make something like Laura Dern's big speech about the imbalance of parental perceptions feel earned. 40 years ago, Kramer vs. Kramer went overboard to give the father a fighting chance in the custody hearings. Marriage Story doesn't have to stack the deck quite as much, but it still works too hard to make sure the audience has sympathy for Driver.

But, Jesus, these performances are great. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson both get some amazing monologues and cries. There are some amazing bits of physical comedy, including one toward the end with Driver that's both hilarious and heartbreaking. Merritt Wever is deliriously good in her few scenes. All the lawyers (Dern, Alda, Liotta) cover the spectrum of that profession beautifully (maybe not accurately, but beautifully). Julie Hagerty as Johansson's mom brings some very good Julie Hagerty energy. Noah Baumbach's greatest strength has always been his ability to get his actors to really tear into their characters.

The big knock I've heard about Marriage Story sounds more like a humblebrag in its favor. The movie is uncomfortably accurate about how difficult a divorce is. I've literally heard that the big Oscar concern for it is that voters aren't interested in reliving their own divorces. My biggest issue is the narrative imbalance, and I'm not really sure the movie has anything new to say. It felt a lot like a checklist of points. Infidelity, check. Failed mediation, check. The kid stuck in the middle, check. The father feeling distant, check. The big fight they should've had before the divorce, check. Or maybe the divorce is too "Hollywood". And, I don't mean that it's too neat. I mean that the particulars of this divorce are too specific to a certain upper-crust experience to relate to it. I mean, the division of assets discussion involves a MacArthur Genius Grant and points on a TV show. The hardship of Driver's character splitting time between New York and Los Angeles means his Broadway play failed. I'm about as much of a coastal elite ally as you're going to find in a flyover state, but damn, at least try to tone things down a bit.

Still, the performances are so good, that it's hard to complain about the rest.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend