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.
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.
Dramas of domestic discord, they’re centered on divorce (The Squid and the Whale), misalliances and sisterly strife (Margot at the Wedding), overbearing parents (The Meyerowitz Stories), and other assorted woes of often well-off unhappy families.
In that respect, Marriage Story is no different than The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, or Frances Ha.
Noah Baumbach is no stranger to fraught relationships: The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding had characters who could say mean, cutting things about their family.
From his coming of age confessional about being raised by two narcissistic parents in The Squid and The Whale, to a lacerating profile of an affected writer visiting her sister in Margot at the Wedding, Baumbach has a knack for exposing our penchant for self-absorption, and in doing so, reflecting our struggle to find empathy.
Here, his unsparing eye is fixed on the dissolution of a marriage that looks not unlike his own to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh: a creative partnership (Leigh played key supporting parts in Margot at the Wedding and Greenberg , and the two of them co-wrote the latter’s story) between two successful artists with a young son (in real life, not an 8-year-old but an infant who was less than a year old when they filed their papers).
Baumbach has 25 years under his belt — including “The Squid and the Whale,” “Frances Ha” and the Gen X touchstone “Kicking and Screaming” — but this one, already highly touted as an Oscar probable, represents a new kind of prominence.
After 10 features, released over a quarter century of filmmaking (his debut, “Kicking and Screaming,” came out in 1995; his other films include “The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg,” and “Frances Ha”), this, at long last, is Baumbach’s breakthrough into the dramatic stratosphere.
The Brooklyn-born filmmaker Noah Baumbach has admirably stuck close to home — making movies about Brooklyn filmmakers, critics, actors, artists, novelists — and mostly resisted the lure of Hollywood, though his résumé does contain a credit for writing Madagascar 3. Before he turned 30, he made two of my favorite films of the Nineties, Kicking and Screaming (1995) and Mr. Jealousy (1997), but recent efforts such as Mistress America (2015) and The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) have also been full of deeply considered characters and wise, witty dialogue.
The New York director’s films have always seemed to flitter somewhere between the bittersweet and the lowdown–first coming to us with Kicking and Screaming in 1995 but only establishing a brand with The Squid and the Whale a whole decade after–a film that remains his most caustic and personal, and perhaps still his best–at least until now.
The story of a marriage is told through the lens of divorce in this meticulously made drama by writer/director Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale) that provokes tears and laughter, sadness and joy.
Baumbach has 25 years under his belt — including “The Squid and the Whale,” “Frances Ha” and the Gen X touchstone “Kicking and Screaming” — but this one, already highly touted as an Oscar probable, represents a new kind of prominence.
In that respect, Marriage Story is no different than The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, or Frances Ha.
Like many of Baumbach’s best films, including Frances Ha, characters are made all the more likable by their flaws, despite having traits and habits many of us will find unusual at first.
The result is Baumbach’s most searing work, and that might seem like a low bar considering his filmography includes movies with a more bittersweet, low-key comedic bent, such as “While We’re Young,” “Mistress America,” “Frances Ha” and “Greenberg.”
The character study of a couple going through divorce elevates itself into the realm of memorability, thanks to an undercurrent of quirky humor, and if you’ve enjoyed Baumbach’s past work like Frances Ha (2012) or While We’re Young (2014) you’ll likely sink your teeth into his latest with relish.
After 10 features, released over a quarter century of filmmaking (his debut, “Kicking and Screaming,” came out in 1995; his other films include “The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg,” and “Frances Ha”), this, at long last, is Baumbach’s breakthrough into the dramatic stratosphere.
[READ MORE: Our review of Noah Baumbach’s 2015 underrated film ‘ While We’re Young ‘ starring Adam Driver]…
Writer-director Noah Baumbach has mined his own life for some sort of inspiration in many past movies including his college days in Kicking and Screaming, his parents’ divorce in The Squid and the Whale and turning 40 in While We’re Young.
His past works such as The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg, and While We’re Young have been studies of human relationships, opting to focus on dialogue and intimacy as opposed to flashy plots with a simple conflict and resolution.
(I realized he hadn’t been out in a while when in his 2014 “While We’re Young” Ben Stiller’s documentarian raised enough money to finish his film by “selling some old CDs.”)
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 ).
The result is Baumbach’s most searing work, and that might seem like a low bar considering his filmography includes movies with a more bittersweet, low-key comedic bent, such as “While We’re Young,” “Mistress America,” “Frances Ha” and “Greenberg.”
In that respect, Marriage Story is no different than The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, or Frances Ha.
His past works such as The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg, and While We’re Young have been studies of human relationships, opting to focus on dialogue and intimacy as opposed to flashy plots with a simple conflict and resolution.
The result is Baumbach’s most searing work, and that might seem like a low bar considering his filmography includes movies with a more bittersweet, low-key comedic bent, such as “While We’re Young,” “Mistress America,” “Frances Ha” and “Greenberg.”
Here, his unsparing eye is fixed on the dissolution of a marriage that looks not unlike his own to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh: a creative partnership (Leigh played key supporting parts in Margot at the Wedding and Greenberg , and the two of them co-wrote the latter’s story) between two successful artists with a young son (in real life, not an 8-year-old but an infant who was less than a year old when they filed their papers).
After 10 features, released over a quarter century of filmmaking (his debut, “Kicking and Screaming,” came out in 1995; his other films include “The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg,” and “Frances Ha”), this, at long last, is Baumbach’s breakthrough into the dramatic stratosphere.
His more recent work (self-deprecating comedies about the anxieties of impending middle age ( Greenberg, While We’re Young , The Meyerowitz Stories ) have suggested a move towards the genial but Marriage Story sees the director tie those two threads together in a way, and one wonders what has taken so long.
The result is Baumbach’s most searing work, and that might seem like a low bar considering his filmography includes movies with a more bittersweet, low-key comedic bent, such as “While We’re Young,” “Mistress America,” “Frances Ha” and “Greenberg.”
The Brooklyn-born filmmaker Noah Baumbach has admirably stuck close to home — making movies about Brooklyn filmmakers, critics, actors, artists, novelists — and mostly resisted the lure of Hollywood, though his résumé does contain a credit for writing Madagascar 3. Before he turned 30, he made two of my favorite films of the Nineties, Kicking and Screaming (1995) and Mr. Jealousy (1997), but recent efforts such as Mistress America (2015) and The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) have also been full of deeply considered characters and wise, witty dialogue.
However, whatever qualities they have found to celebrate in works like “The Squid and the Whale,” “Margot at the Wedding” and his Greta Gerwig-led trilogy of “Greenberg,” “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America” have managed to elude me completely.
But as the director entered his forties, his films shifted focus onto younger people – in particular While We’re Young and Mistress America, which tapped into a fresh, funny, zeitgeisty spirit.
With sharp supporting turns from Alan Alda, Laura Dern, and Ray Liotta, as well as the deft editing of Jennifer Lame, who has worked with Baumbach on Frances Ha, While We’re Young, Mistress America, and The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected).
If you’re familiar with Baumbach’s style and others films like Mistress America or Greenberg, there was always a cold bitterness.
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
There’s none of the sickening emotional dread that you feel in obvious influences like Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” or Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives.”
It’s good, but it’s no “Scenes from a Marriage” or “Husbands and Wives” or hell, “Company,” for that matter.
Think Kramer vs. Kramer meets Husbands and Wives with smartphones.
Scenes from a Marriage , Husbands and Wives , all that.
Baumbach’s Marriage Story touches off being a more even-handed Kramer Vs Kramer , or a two-handed Husbands And Wives , but really wears Scenes From A Marriage on its sleeve, another made-for-TV affair.
It’s been clear for several years now that Baumbach has picked up where Woody Allen left off (or might have), and with Marriage Story he gives us his Husbands and Wives .
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.
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?”
If anything, the film is closer to Mike Nichols’ relationship dramas like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Closer .
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).
Advertisement
We’ve been watching them for decades, from emotional dramas like Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) to more humorous takes on the subject in Irreconcilable Differences (1984) and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993).
But Baumbach has suggested that some of the staginess of the performances may have been deliberate, citing his research into Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) and other screwball comedies in which the story hinges on two characters whose relationship extends both to work and love.