2019 In Review: Marriage Story

The Greatest Divorce Movie Ever Made

AKA: Two attractive people legally yell at each other for two hours, and Adam Driver sings a song

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“The burden of these battles is immeasurable. I had a client get colon cancer and die before he and his wife came to an agreement.”

Indie darling Noah Baumbach understands the fractured reality of dysfunctional relationships better than perhaps any mainstream filmmaker working today. With next to no plot, his films are orchestrated strictly by character movement; unstable folks attempting to function in a broken world, and the seemingly innocent writer-director is unabashedly unafraid to put his characters through absolute hell in order to escape their pain alive. With Marriage Story, Baumbach doesn’t just tear into the souls of his two leads; he emotionally drains them, like throwing two actors into a riveting stage performance, resulting in a film that is perhaps the peak of the man’s career.

  Baumbach understands what it means to be human and he captures that not just through his leads but even the way in which he frames his shots. His characters move while they speak; they pick things up, they put things down; they cook and clean, and change clothes, and take a piss while exchanging dialogue. These may seem like irrelevant details, but watching Baumbach’s characters is like peering through the windows of real life.

  In what captures one of Scarlett Johansson’s better performance to date, Marriage Story continues to showcase Adam Driver as one of the best actors working today, and Baumbach harnesses an unimaginable energy from the two leads like a tennis match on fire. Every interaction between Charlie and Nicole crackles with intimate rage, and Noah channels their aggression even down to the way they silently stare into each other’s souls.

  From the beginning love letters of warm, intimate confession between Charlie and Nicole, Marriage Story takes an immediately cold left turn within the opening minutes, and heads down the hills of divorce fast, showing not just how financially threatening, but how emotionally devastating the entire process becomes.

  By having his two leada as theater people; actor and director, Baumbach demonstrates his characters like the vast equivalent of watching a dramatic Broadway play, and despite the lack of literal death, the end result of the film has the fatal weight of the stuff of Shakespeare, and watching Marriage Story often literally feels like watching a Broadway play.

  Voiced by fierce lawyers, Laura Dern and Ray Liotta, Charlie and Nicole’s relationship is constantly tested, exposed, and slowly beaten to a pulp. Their entire marriage, the good but mostly the bad, is displayed like a horrible circus event, for the entire world to see. In utilizing their son Henry as a literal middle man, between L.A. and New York, the characters are consistently at each other’s throats, slowly stripping each other down to their fiber of their every being.

  Charlie is displayed as the loyal father, but the absent husband; Nicole, the ambitious mother, yet messy wife. By toying with the emotions of deeply flawed and honest, human characters, Baumbach isn’t out to uncover the terrible truths behind a marriage that is falling apart, but set on expressing the value of a relationship that is no longer together. As disheartening as divorce is, it can be a saving grace, especially with a child’s emotional being at stake, and that’s the moral Baumbach is here to state.

  The film is scored like a theatrical show in itself, with swooning violins juxtaposed against mellow horns were we watching something warm and fuzzy like a Pixar film. It’s when the raw drama hits that such musical layers add depth beyond the feel-good skin the film often wears.

  The big fight in the third act of the film is not only a bone chilling, Oscar-worthy showcase for the two lead actors; It is also the very essence of toxic relationships, and a visual representation as to why some marriages are truly better off coming to end. This was never a story about the repercussions of marriage, but the evaluation of a relationship doomed to fail.

  By the film’s end, upon the finality of Charlie and Nicole’s custody battle, Marriage Story plays out like a damaged relationship in itself, inflating the honeymoon phase of all the ups just as spiraling as the hideous collapse of all the downs, into an ultimately quiet climax as we are left to slowly unwind the literal drama of a marriage in each of its two leads. Once the curtains close and Adam Driver sings his swan song of melancholy, there’s truly no going back.

  Watching Marriage Story is like going through a divorce for the audience themselves; it’s exhausting. It’s like being slowly torn apart brick by brick, bulldozing down the horrors of a fractured relationship that once stood tall, but can no longer be rebuilt. In a world of cinema constantly putting positive romance on false display, Baumbach is here to reveal raw honesty between two people who genuinely love each other, but no longer have the heart to stay together. And goddammit, it is heart wrenching to watch.

*25 points to Driver 

*25 points to Scar-Jo 

*50 points to Noah 

You go, Noah