I'm a huge Noah Baumbach fan, and Marriage Story has been on my radar for a while now. They way Baumbach can mine a deep reservoir of personal experiences for natural comedy and deeply moving drama is stunning, and it's a relevant thing in Marriage Story, a film that's seemingly heavily informed by his own divorce. It's a film that's drawn comparisons to Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman, and is being called his best film, and that's a hard thing to disagree with. I actually prefer The Meyerowitz Stories as a film, but at the risk of sounding pretentious, Marriage Story feels like his most emotionally accomplished movie, the one that gets under its character's skin and draws everything out and gets every emotion at its absolutely most potent level. Like Squid and the Whale or Meyerowitz Stories, this is a film of moments, but crucially, it revolves around one: the big argument scene. It's become a popular scene to celebrate or to laugh at, but I think it's the thing at the centre of Marriage Story, what the story is leading up to and what it eventually tries to recover from. I'll get into that later on, but this scene works so well because it fits so well into this film and the way it uses its drama. It's very controlled, quiet and natural and almost observational, entirely spent watching two people trying to navigate a difficult situation, attempting to avoid pain and toxicity, if nothing else than for the sake of their young son.
It's clear from the start that this is relationship is completely frozen over, but I think the opening of this film is so genius because it begins with two people listing the things they love about each other. There aren't any real flashbacks to life before the divorce after this, and I love that, because there's nothing that needs to be said that isn't in the first few minutes. Right off the bat, you know that these two loved each other, and you know why, and watching something that you know was once sweet but has soured is a unique kind of heartbreaking. The film excels at lowkey drama, reluctantly pitting a couple against each other and urging you not to pick a side. Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver don't even feel like they're acting, going through rage, and sadness and longing and everything else that comes with a loss of love. There are no winners or losers here, just a pair of people who want to stay amicable, who want to minimize the pain as much as possible. That this plays out so naturally makes it harder to watch. They're given great support by a vicious Ray Liotta and a hilarious Alan Alda, but the MVP here is Laura Dern, giving the best performance in the film as a divorce lawyer who is alternately warm and ruthless. It's the most actor-driven film he's made, and just watching everyone be so incredible is a treat in itself to witness
The structure is pretty much like most of his other films, episodes, scenes from a (dead) marriage, but each one contains so much sadness (the entire Halloween sequence is quietly gutting) and comedy (Merritt Weaver turns delivering bad news into an artform), that it's definitely one of his more resonant films. He's always been more about content than experimentation, and watching as he empathetically and forensically brings these details to life, imbuing each one with so much pathos and love. There's not even much of a plot, just a careful study of a divorce in moments, connected together by an overarching mosaic of emotion, a constant tone that's ebbing and flowing. Sometimes it rises up and threatens to crash into a wave, but Baumbach's skill at holding back, at keeping everything just under the surface. And that's why the climax works so well. If you look at the film's structure, there aren't scenes as such, just moments in the haze of emotional stress that Baumbach is happening to catch. None of them feel scripted, like they're part of a story or arranged in an especially important order, with the exception of the argument, the point of maximum tension, where the non-specifically chosen moments fall back into a very precisely plotted explosion.
Actually just taking this scene on its own for a minute, I can see why out of context, it'd seem silly or over-the-top, but with the two-ish hours that came before it setting up so much resentment and loathing and pain, seeing it released is a pretty distressing experience. What happens in this scene is not the point of Marriage Story- it's not a film that celebrates the emotional fallout of a divorce or relishes in two people taking potshots at each other- but it is the scene that the film hinges on. Tonally, and emotionally, the swell of emotion was building into this until it's fit to burst. I never felt like the specifics of what was happening in each moment mattered, anything that evoked the same feelings would have done, but the way each one of them adds another layer of sadness, putting so much stress on this relationship and urging it towards its breaking point is what matters. The fallout is similar, with the film trying to recover, trying to cool down, to heal. It's never something that truly leaves this film, or the two leads, when it happens
So Marriage Story is a really brilliantly constructed drama that hinges around one moment. If I had to nitpick it in terms of Baumbach's movies, it's that although I thought it was really excellently put together, an definitely his best film in terms of its direction and script, but it just didn't affect me in the same way The Meyorwitz Stories did. There's an intentional (yet incredibly reluctant) coldness to this film, and though I appreciated his deft telling of a story about two people who don't want their lives to be that cold, I definitely felt myself appreciating it, and felt a lot of the emotion in it, too, but for me, it just doesn't have the lived-in quality of his last one. That's a personal thing, but it doesn't take away from how fantastically Marriage Story breathes life into the often-portrayed-but-rarely-in-this-much-detail subject of divorce, and Baumbach's detailed study of it is absolutely made by how he's studying it. He lets everything orbit around the extreme, the massive argument that is undoubtedly a product of this emotional stress but is absolutely not indicative of what this relationship is. It's delicate, and poignant and funny, but the real heft of the drama comes from the intensity of that moment. Not that it's the only good thing in the film, because the incredible performances, emotional rawness and the delicate ebbing and flowing of the drama make Marriage Story one of 2019's most precise and powerful dramas, one that I hugely respect and admire more than I actually enjoy. Still, I love that Baumbach is so present as a cinematic voice, and spending two hours in his dramatic observations is more than enough for me to give this a big ol' thumbs up
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