Review: Marriage Story is a heartbreaking tale of divorce and loss
By Audrey Fox
Marriage Story is a devastatingly honest exploration of the breakdown of a family with career-defining performances from Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson.
“Divorce lawyers see good people at their worst,” an affable attorney played by Alan Alda tells Charlie (Adam Driver) as he seeks representation. Marriage Story is heartbreaking because its cruelty feels somehow inevitable — that once papers have been served, each party discovers a seemingly endless capacity to hurt one another and both are powerless to stop the carnage. And yet they still clearly care deeply for one another, as do we for them.
That the film begins with both Charlie and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) extolling each others’ virtues as part of a mediation exercise sends a clear message: These are not inherently bad people. It’s a reminder we’ll need as the events of Marriage Story unfold.
Charlie is an avant-garde theater director whose most recent production is poised to become his Broadway debut. Nicole is the lead actress in his show, a native Californian who got her start in a teen sex comedy and yearns to return to film and television. But perhaps more importantly, she wants her own identity outside of her creative partnership with her husband. They share an eight-year-old son, Henry, whom they both love dearly. And they’re staring down the barrel of a contentious divorce.
Clearly drawn from director Noah Baumbach’s previous marriage, Marriage Story is perhaps his most intimate and deeply personal film. It offers a nuanced and devastating real look at the dissolution of a marriage. At one point, divorce is referenced as “a death without a body,” which highlights what a massive role grief plays in the proceedings. There’s tremendous loss that each party deals with — grief for a lost relationship, a family unit, a way of life.
The look on Charlie’s face when processing the idea that his son may end up living in Los Angeles full time, while he lives 3,000 miles away in New York, and a helpful lawyer suggests that maybe Henry will choose an east coast school for college one day, shows just how little he’s prepared for the colossal changes that are about to take place.
But it’s not even just about grief. It’s about resentment, anger, and bewilderment. And to make matters worse, their lawyers only seem interested in treating the court proceedings like a caged MMA fight. Each attorney is confident that their counterpart is out for blood, so they launch a preemptive strike. The result is scorched earth; the once supposedly amicable split is now a street fight. We feel every moment how unfair and painful and destructive this all has to be for some unknown reason. And we haven’t even gotten to the part where Adam Diver sings “Being Alive,” which is so achingly perfect that it redefines soul-crushing.
It’s worth saying that this very well might be Driver’s best performance to date, one that could easily earn him his first Academy Award. There’s not a moment in the film that feels as though he’s acting, his work subtle and painfully real. Scarlett Johansson has perhaps fewer career-defining moments — Noah Baumbach is telling his own story after all, and although he does an admirable job of maintaining an impartial balance between the two characters, there’s an ever-so-slight lean toward Charlie’s perspective.
Still, her work here is equally impressive. The frustration of having her dreams and creative ambition deemed somehow less important than her husband’s is particularly compelling. They both seem poised for awards attention this year, with Laura Dern as the deliciously vile shark of a divorce attorney and Alan Alda’s kinder, gentler (and ultimately less effective) lawyer likely to join them.
Noah Baumbach has done something incredible and lasting here: Marriage Story taps into universal human emotions that will ensure the film’s relevance for years to come, and his soul-rending family drama feels as close to perfection as any film can get.
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