Marriage Story is a 2019 drama about a young couple breaking up while keeping the family together.
If you haven’t seen Noah Baumbach‘s latest film Marriage Story, you really ought to. Streaming on Netflix now, this mix of raw emotional damage and human comedy is just one more feather in the director’s already crowded hat of movies that basically flat out continue to save cinema as an art form.
You have things to do, places to go, and I get that time is crucial, so I won’t bog this down on reasons why Baumback and his movies are doing such, but ever since the mid-1990s, he’s been behind some of the most affecting, offbeat and downright courageous movies in release. His stories are like if old Woody Allen movies got edgier, darker, and more, well, real.
With Marriage Story, we meet a couple in the throes of a separation. They are Charlie (Adam Driver) and his wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson). He is a theatrical director, successful but not acclaimed, on the verge of great accomplishments. She is an actor, having been, early in her career, a star in a blockbuster teen romcom before leaving movies for the stage. A sort of power couple in New York’s hard core theater circles, she and he now make stage productions, though there is a divide slowly cutting through them.
They have a young son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), who is understandably impacted by these two, who both deeply love their child but are drifting apart in every other way. When they finally agree to end their relationship, there is expectation that it will go amicably, but when she heads to LA for a television series, the gaps between then become chasms. Deep, vulnerable chasms where all lies open to see.
There are, naturally, a slew of genuinely great moments in Marriage Story, the film a collection of intimate breakdowns and humorous, authentic bits of real life that give the stage-like experience a roundhouse kick of “oh geesh.” Driver and Johansson are as close to perfection in their careers as ever before, not just believable but achingly real in bringing these two characters to harsh moments of judgement, both by themselves and us.
That starts with a very early moment in the story, when we already know that they are in the process of figuring out how to separate. They have hired a mediator, whom he likes but she, not so much, and worse, they are in the last performances of his new play before it heads to Broadway, though she has already bowed out for those.
The scene is at their home, a dimly-lit evening after the final show. They are living together but in the loosest terms, yet we are getting the feeling that this is harder for her than him. He is not a bad guy per se, but he seems less invested emotionally, his director personal making nearly every aspect of his life one he seem purposefully detached from.
He is sitting in front the the television, though not watching. She comes into the room and the talk steers toward their break. He flatly tells her that if she’s not happy with the mediator, they can find another. He then says they don’t really need one anyway, believing (as he blindly does for a long time) that she is on the same footing as he with dividing things in peace. We can see that even as he claims “we want the same things” it’s not that at all for her.
Then he casually dismisses her upcoming work in TV, telling her that it will be fun for her, which we get as eviscerating, yet she sort of defensively asks if he thinks it’s bad. His response is pitch perfect and I won’t share what that reveals, but it’s small things like this that make Baumbach’s movie’s so smart (even what’s on the set is part of the plan – hint: Tom Hank‘s The Money Pit).
Either way, it’s late and Nicole gets up to head alone to her bedroom, while he is leafing through a small notebook he keeps, jotting down thoughts about the play. She knows this, and clearly sees he wants to offer stage notes on her performance, even though she won’t be in the show anymore. He politely (sort of) tells her just that, but she knows he won’t rest until he can, so he does.
Again, I won’t describe what he says, and honestly, for those like us outside of theater and director and actors and stage notes, it all doesn’t sound like much, which is the point. But for Nicole, it is everything, and I love the ways Johansson has Nicole physically prepare for this, the subtle adjustment of her top as if reinforcing invisible armor, the folding of her arms in hope to deflect what shots of criticism are coming, and the cinched face of disillusionment that comes from having to go through this, clearly not the first time. She even takes a stance of explanation, a kind of obligatory description of what she was doing while acting.
And then, she says goodnight, walking out of the room and the camera shifts, leading her away from the man she surely once loved who has in a sense directed her life for years and been allowed to open notes and mark her failures and need for improvement. She is a passionate actor on stage and yet like all of us, is not without need for approval. Especially from the one she loves.
The walk to the bedroom is harrowing as Nicole silently breaks down, draining tears of quiet sorrow as she escapes in the back room. This is indeed the end for Nicole and Charlie, and without a word, we finally see and feel it.
What’s so powerful about this is how it sort of takes us by surprise as both Nicole and Charlie seem to this point on equal footing, that this separation and coming divorce are if anything, devoid of emotional entanglements. At least those of great impact. But here, right here, that changes. Baumback pulls back the curtain on Nicole and lowers the boom and with a lilting piece of music accompanying her, she falls into her bed and the night takes her. That she wakes up in a different bed at a different time says more to us than anything that a stream of usual exposition could ever. This is a great storytelling. And a truly great moment.