Scarlett Johansson, Azhy Robertson and Adam Driver in “Marriage Story.” credit: newson6.com
Not normally a director whose work I actively seek out, Noah Baumbach’s earlier films tend to highlight the accumulating small disappointments and subsequent bitterness of domestic life, and their depressive effect on families and relationships. He’d reportedly spread out a bit in his following film collaborations with Greta Gerwig (Greenberg, Frances Ha, Mistress America), and woven his customary acid in with broader doses of humor and graciousness. Marriage Story (USA, 2019) profitably draws from both of those wells.
Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) are separating, and both have a healthy fear of the finality and failure that divorce might represent. Charlie’s a successful off-Broadway stage director, and his career is in a slow but insistent ascension. Nicole is a talented actress, reliable and hardworking, and performs in Charlie’s work. But she gave up a burgeoning film career in Los Angeles in order to be with Charlie and start a family with him in New York, and she’s experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse. The self-sufficiency that makes him so good as an artist and father isn’t nearly as sustaining for Nicole, and there’s a growing void in her life that she needs to solve. On a trip to L.A. to visit her family, a friend of a friend refers her to a lawyer, Nora Fanshaw (the terrific Laura Dern), who commiserates with Nicole and persuades her that divorcing Charlie will be the best thing she can do for herself, her career and their young son Henry (Azhy Robertson). Charlie is understandably distressed at the prospect of divorcing, even more so when shopping for his own lawyer, and trying to navigate the NY / LA dilemma.
It’s easy to diminish the story as White People’s problems, and you get to do that, but the most admirable thing here, the thing that rang truest, was knowing what nice people they were, knowing how hard they’ve worked to create their family, knowing how loving and supportive they’ve both tried to be for a long time, and ultimately knowing that none of that was going to work for them anymore anyway. That scenario is artfully and expressively constructed, but our admiration must co-exist with the sadness, the inevitability. Then the issue becomes an uncertain partnership to keep their lawyers from eating the both of them alive.
I wouldn’t call Baumbach’s narrative structure here clean or tight – he (and cinematographer Robbie Ryan) set fairly hard boundaries for the actions to occur in, but, like John Cassavettes, he sets the actors loose on the script and in the scene, and the eccentricities and loose ends of the moment become part of the fabric of the characters. Some of the more deliberate character/camera movements feel forced, stagy or obvious, and he’s not good with larger group scenes. Overall, it’s well-shot but awkwardly executed. But his actors are superb here, and clearly like working with him. I need to perhaps backtrack to some of those earlier films I passed on.
Regrettably, I need to put this very good film midpack among the nominees. But the competition is fierce this year – the top six or seven films are all contenders.
Periscope In The Bathtub 