Movie Review: Now This Is a "Marriage Story" All About How Lives Get Flipped, Turned Upside Down

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are amazing in Noah Baumbach’s maybe-autobiographical divorce dramedy.

"I can’t believe I have to know you forever!" is the kind of venomous dialogue you could attribute to almost any character from writer-director Noah Baumbach’s filmography.

But it's specifically yelled by Nicole Barber, one-half of the consciously-uncoupling couple in his apparently semi-autobiographical new Netflix movie Marriage Story.

Scarlett Johansson plays Nicole, an actress who slowly surrendered her identity and aspirations to make her marriage work. Adam Driver plays Charlie, the New York theatre director she wedded, who adores raising their eight-year-old child Henry (Azhy Robertson), yet is otherwise self-absorbed.

As the film opens, each explains to the audience why they love one another. When the montage of their individual adorations end, we cut to them in marital mediation, refusing to read the list aloud. The marriage, we discover, is already well and truly over. The next 136 minutes demonstrates how hard—and ultimately fruitless—it will be to slice each other out of their lives. Yes, Nicole has to know Charlie forever. And they also have to spend tens of thousands of dollars just to make it official.

Marriage Story begins with two people already at vastly different poles figuring out how to cleave their commitments, hoping to still stand one another by the end. In that way, it fits the typical structure of a cinematic romance, except with 'mutual respect' the climactic goal rather than a triumphant kiss or emphatic reunion at an airport. 'Mutual respect' is really as romantic a gesture as Baumbach can imagine anyway, even if he has softened since partnering with Greta Gerwig, beginning on Frances Ha. (He used to be married to the actor Jennifer Jason Leigh, with whom he has a son. Did I mention this might be semi-autobiographical?)

Still, I found Marriage Story to be exceptionally moving, and yes, in its own way, romantic. Credit for that has to jointly go to its stars. It’s amazing that Scarlett Johansson, queen of the bad takes, is so tuned-in and emotionally intelligent here as a woman unsure of what she wants yet certain of what she doesn’t. Adam Driver, meanwhile, is a triple threat in the part of Baumbach’s stand-in, holding back until he needs to go volcanic; displaying some unlikely physical comedy; and, best of all, belting the Stephen Sondheim number "Being Alive" as a piece of impromptu karaoke. (The song has also been performed by Barbra Streisand, and when Babs sings something, it belongs to her forever, but in this case, I’m suggesting she and Driver share custody.)

It’s not just a two-hander. The whole ensemble is engrossing, from Laura Dern as Nicole’s glamorous, leaning-in lawyer; to Ray Liotta and Alan Alda as two solicitors on opposite ends of the empathy spectrum representing Charlie’s interests in court; to Martha Kelly, a one-scene wonder, playing a stilted evaluator who watches Charlie and Henry have a quiet dinner that ends in embarrassment.

Both the tragedy and absurd comedy of it all comes from the Kafkaesque nightmare that is Californian divorce law, and the circuitous process that ends up costing Nicole and Charlie thousands. It brings to mind Jesse Eisenberg’s character in Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, who describes a novel as "Kafkaesque", only to be told by his classmate, "That’s because it was written by Franz Kafka". But this thing was decidedly written by Baumbach, who fuses his prickly dialogue and characters of slow-boiling frustration with the sensibilities of a pre-cancelled Woody Allen. If anything, Marriage Story is a lot like Annie Hall, if Annie Hall was mostly about the difficulty in moving back and forth between LA and NY to facilitate a break-up (and it kinda was).

The centrepiece scene involves Nicole and Charlie meeting at Charlie’s sparse LA apartment to sort out the details of their untangling without lawyers present. The remaining issue on the table: whether Henry will stay in LA with Nicole or move back to NY with Charlie. (I can’t decide if Henry’s disinterest in his parents’ separation is meant to reassure us they’re better off without one another, or that he’s equipped to handle what is these days an everyday occurrence, or if it’s just too early to see the psychological aftershocks.) Their debate starts reasonably, only to crescendo in emotional carnage. When the dust settles, you think, yeah, I’d pay a lawyer $25,000 to not have to go through that too.

During that scene, the camera cuts ever closer, until Johansson and Driver’s faces fill the screen. It reinforces that Baumbach is more than a writer who also directs. The act of direction is to not only usher performers into specific emotional headspaces, but to put the camera in the right spot at the right time (assisted by a cinematographer, of course). He does that throughout the hilarious, heartbreaking Marriage Story, a triumph in his filmmaking career.

Some will pick a side between Nicole and Charlie based on the baggage they personally bring to it. I went back and forth, mostly finding the movie even-handed. There’s no denying that until a divorced directorial duo jointly make this kind of flick, you’ll only get a skewed perspective—usually, the man’s. Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze had individual cracks with Lost in Translation and Her. Maybe James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow can make their own Marriage Story? Though if we’re talking about a marriage to James Cameron, American Horror Story would be the more appropriate title.

4.5/5

In select Australian cinemas now. Marriage Story arrives on Netflix 6 December 2019. Rated M for mature themes, coarse language and sexual references.

Header Image: Netflix