Marriage Story (2019)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
A stage director and an actress struggle through a grueling, coast-to-coast divorce that pushes them to their personal extremes.
48 connections found
View:
48 films that influenced Marriage Story
What critics say influenced Marriage Story
In 2005, Noah Baumbach used memories of his parents’ contentious divorce in the brilliantly observed, bleakly funny The Squid And The Whale.
If you thought director/writer Noah Baumbach perfectly depicted a family amidst divorce with The Squid and the Whale, his latest film Marriage Story will prove he was only scratching the surface until now.
It’s a subject that Baumbach has taken on before, in “The Squid and the Whale,” although this time he’s not coming at it through kids’ eyes, but the adults’.
Noah Baumbach has not strayed from the topics of marriage or divorce before, tackling such subjects in the films Margot At The Wedding and The Squid and The Whale , respectively.
Even more so than The Squid and the Whale , Baumbach’s acclaimed film about his parents’ divorce, because this time we’re hearing from the adults; not the children.
As in most of his films, including The Squid and the Whale and the previous Netflix original The Meyerowitz Stories, Baumbach is interested in complex, literate, artistic people with difficulty hanging onto their marriages.
References don’t end at Scenes from a Marriage though; a scene where the couple and their child lie in bed together, physically close but their gazes wandering and unmet, directly references a scene from Fanny and Alexander, suggesting the immense spiritual distance between characters.
“Marriage Story” is an emotionally lacerating experience, a nearly flawless elegy for a beautifully flawed couple, a broken-family classic to set beside “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Fanny and Alexander,” to name two films that Baumbach references visually here.
With its intimate camerawork, witty one-liners, drama that draws you in and haunting soundtrack, Baumbach's ( The Squid and the Whale , While We're Young ) tale certainly reminds one of the best of Woody Allen's output (think Hannah and Her Sisters , Annie Hall ).
Marriage Story is rich in both incident and emotion, as Nicole deals with family loyalty — her mother (Julie Hagerty) is fond of Charlie and wants to remain friends with him — while Charlie is forced to regularly fly to the West Coast even as he struggles to mount his latest production on the East Coast (the NYC-LA tug-of-war brings to mind the hilarious turf battle showcased in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall ).
But Marriage Story finds Baumbach in an expectation-confounding mood; rather than a wistful postmortem of a failed romance à la Annie Hall , the movie offers a chronicle of conflictedness, and of how a relationship changes — flails, explodes, evolves — over the course of divorce proceedings.
There are echoes of Annie Hall in the East-West Coast divide and the way it comes to represent not just a gap in geography but in mentality, symbolic of the widening rift itself.
It’s the old New York-vs.-L.A. values debate, the one mythologized in “Annie Hall,” only the way this plays out in “Marriage Story” is far more lacerating.
Much of the film takes place in Los Angeles, and his evenhanded effort slips a bit in his “Annie Hall”-inflected depiction of the city as a New Agey haven for the shallow.
The remainder of Marriage Story is grueling, like the heart-wrenching third-act argument in Before Midnight between Celine and Jesse stretched out for 2+ hours.
It reminds me a lot of “Before Midnight,” but where Jesse and Celine are a couple you actively want to root for, Nicole and Charlie are not.
He strives for Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” (1973), building to a monster blowout argument to rival Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963) or Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight” (2013).
Driver quietly embodies the frustration of being ambushed by Nicole’s seemingly sudden decisions, slowly erupting into a superbly acted and extremely uncomfortable to watch fight between the couple rivaled only by the volatile argument depicted in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight.
“Marriage Story” rarely gets explosive, except one signature scene that channels Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight” (2013).
When the two of them are on screen together, it’s humanity that shines through, whether in a raucous argument that recalls the best moments of Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight or in a courtroom scene that sees both of them remain tellingly silent.
Advertisement
His Marriage Story, a masterpiece loosely based on his own divorce six years ago from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, is the best divorce movie since A Separation, if not Kramer vs. Kramer (which it echoes).
Think Kramer vs. Kramer meets Husbands and Wives with smartphones.
That, in many ways, highlights a critical difference between Marriage Story and the superior 1980 Oscar winner, Kramer vs. Kramer.
Over a (too long) 2 hours and 17 minutes, Baumbach provides episodes from this process, ranging from meetings with divorce lawyers, to attempts at sharing time with the child, Henry (Azhy Robertson, with a 1970s-style moptop haircut much like Justin Henry's in Kramer vs. Kramer).
Forty years after Robert Benton essayed the struggles of divorce with the solemnity of a war crime in Kramer vs. Kramer, Baumbach crafts a more complex, intimate, and funnier film that makes the pain of truly irreconcilable differences all the bitterer.
Falling between the canonical Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Joachim Lafosse’s underseen After Love (2016), with humorous bits by way of Allan King’s A Married Couple (1969), Marriage Story scrutinizes both perspectives involved in the legal and emotional distress caused by separation and the shared custody of a child.
With its intimate camerawork, witty one-liners, drama that draws you in and haunting soundtrack, Baumbach's ( The Squid and the Whale , While We're Young ) tale certainly reminds one of the best of Woody Allen's output (think Hannah and Her Sisters , Annie Hall ).
It’s theatrical, melodramatic, over-the-top and no more representative of the end of a marriage than say a Woody Allen movie set in the same showbiz family milieu, “Hannah and Her Sisters.”
The parallels between this and Noah’s own life are sometimes so obvious that it’s hard to believe that Leigh has given the movie her approval: for example, Scarlett Johansson’s actress Nicole here was the star of a teen sex comedy, while Leigh began her career in Fast Times At Ridgemont High and, furthermore, when Adam Driver’s theatre director Charlie is revealed to have grown intimate with a colleague, it’s hard not to think that this is some thinly-veiled reference to Noah’s collaborator and now-partner Greta Gerwig.
If anything, the film is closer to Mike Nichols’ relationship dramas like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Closer .
From that moment onward, Baumbach charts their journey from somewhat vague dissatisfaction with each other to spiteful aggravation to a destructive, white-hot anger that would make Richard Burton and Liz Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” say, “Hey, bring it down a notch or three.”
Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney were explosive together, at times approaching the blistering black humor of the mommy and daddy of all unhappy marriage movies, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Advertisement
“Scenes from a Marriage” is the headline on a magazine article about Charlie and Nicole, and she even plays Electra onstage, as Liv Ullmann’s character does in “Persona” (1966).
For the movie’s assembly of close-ups of characters, Baumbach cites Bergman’s “Persona.”
Like the overlap between the protagonists’ professional and private lives, the hint at Bergman’s Persona is one of the predictable items that Charlie shares with the auteur archetype.
It’s been investigated with more vigor hundreds of times by everyone from Ingmar Bergman to Woody Allen (Richard Brooks’ underrated The Happy Ending is a particular favorite of mine).