Marriage Story

In Marriage Story, the waiter says to the father of the groom, "You have to enjoy this wedding, your son only gets married two or three times in your life." With such a number, it is not surprising that divorce also comes into play. Practice confirms this in the USA, where more than half of married couples get divorced. Marriage Story has hit a sore spot in contemporary Western society and has inevitably become one of the most talked-about films of the season. Noah Baumbach incorporated his personal experiences from his breakup with his former partner Jennifer Jason Leigh into the film. Baumbach takes no sides, nor does he focus on pathological behavior or people who, due to their weaknesses and personal traits, are unable to maintain a partnership. The desire for a dual-career marriage is to blame, which is difficult to reconcile with family life in certain professions. Both parties in the divorce are reasonable and level-headed individuals who theoretically should be able to agree on an acceptable form of separation and custody of their son in the child's best interest. However, the child inevitably becomes the catalyst for a court battle that takes on increasingly absurd and tragicomic dimensions. The director demonstrates an excellent sense of detail and adeptly balances between multiple genres. You would expect this to be a tear-jerking depressive drama, but Baumbach is not afraid to use purely entertaining supporting characters and adds sarcastic jabs to intense moments. Driver and Johansson are both likable and excellent actors whom you believe in their hesitations and pain as they become estranged and inflict emotional wounds on each other. While the film didn't take me to any heavenly heights, I consider it to be significantly above-average, well-written and well-directed. Overall impression: 80%. (2020-12-03)

With Marriage Story, it’s like when you forget that you’re watching actors in a film and you feel as though you are intensely living the situation that the protagonists are going through. This is a fragile, dialogue-driven relationship film that employs excellent camerawork and editing in telling the story. Scarlett’s first confession to her lawyer is perhaps the film’s most brilliant scene. Her acting is comparable to Naomi Watts’s breathtaking performance in the rehearsal scene from Mulholland Drive. There is also, for example, the build-up of tension through editing, with gradual approaches to tense faces in the quarrel, and the climax in which the worst is said and then immediately regretted. It wouldn’t work so well on the stage without those close-ups of the actors’ faces. The dialogue is so authentic and the natures of the characters so precisely formed that playing them must have been creative ecstasy. And it’s not just Driver and Scarlett who turn in wonderful performances here. Laura Dern makes a full-force comeback in a small space and Ray Liotta masterfully makes up for his absence in The Irishman in an even smaller space. Marriage Story is like the best of Woody Allen, with a touch of La La Land’s heart. In my opinion, an Oscar for best screenplay is inevitable. (2019-12-24)

Precisely balanced with a spicy script and many brilliant scenes. Baumbach at his best. He's not afraid to work with emotions and will even invite a bunch of old codgers to help him out. Laura Dern, Alan Alda and especially Ray Liotta portray exactly what is expected of them. And when it sometimes goes to the absurd, the writer and director in one always break it in another direction and the ride continues. I wouldn’t hesitate to call Marriage Story the relationship drama of the year. It does not moralise, nor does it take sides, it does an excellent job of showing the typically masculine ills of self-centeredness and not listening to the other side, as well as the feminine ills of not thinking rationally and sacrificing family for one's own sense of achievement, work fulfillment and satisfaction. Both sides are easy to understand, the fuck-up is right in the middle. And they portray that fact flawlessly. (2019-12-29)

Scenes of married life, or what passes for it. I didn't know whether to prepare myself for absolute heartbreak from a little boy's perspective or for a rundown of the deliberate toxicity that can be generated by two people who once loved each other more than anything in the world. And although there is at least a taste of both present, I was decently beside myself in both cases. The main action surprisingly focuses on the legal process of divorce itself and what it forces both spouses to do, regardless of their original intentions. It is a spectacle full of bewildered frowns and disappointment at the inevitable, and thanks to Adam Driver's spot-on performance, it gets under your skin. Scarlett Johansson has the kinds of lines where you can hear the rustling of paper, which is not her fault but rather Noah Baumbach's, who clearly has Charlie figured out and yet is struggling painfully to understand the other side, which he never fully does. I expected more emotional clashes, which came only in the declining (but all the more powerful) finale, and I also expected more natural transitions within the carefully constructed legal process of divorce itself. In the end, it is neither as devastating nor as disarming as I expected or hoped, yet the story is incredibly strong, unpleasant at the right moments, and in the first and last place, honest. (2019-12-15)

It's better to watch this before midnight. Even so, it’s a very well filmed and acted drama about a relationship falling apart, demonstrating the gradual disintegration of family values. In the end, I had a feeling that divorce isn’t so bad after all, that life goes on and everyone involved wins something out of it, either a lesson or a double Halloween. And that isn’t good from a moral point of view. Because, all said, everybody lost. (2020-08-13)