SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
With a sharp but uneven script and excellent acting performances, Marriage Story is a deep dive into a couple’s failing relationship that’s worth taking.
Let me preface this review by saying I have never been married, let alone divorced, so I may not fully grasp the web of feelings that unhappily married people (or divorcees) experience as they go through it. With all that said, Marriage Story (Divorce Story may be more apt a name) was quite engrossing, insightful, and at times, funny! It’s an intricate and tender exploration of love and hate that helped me imagine what they go through, at least on some level. As the film peels back the interlocking layers of empathy and resentment within its couple, it shows how bizarre the situation can get, as both of them account for every little promise kept or broken by the other to gain a legal edge.
Marriage Story follows Charlie Barber (Adam Driver), a talented theater director and his wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), a teen actress who Charlie met years earlier in Los Angeles, who performs in his plays. Nicole develops a resentment towards Charlie over the years, having given up a lot for his life in New York and doesn’t feel she’s done any work or made any significant decisions she can call her own. When Nicole gets a high-paying role in LA, she takes their son Henry with her to the audition and drops a bomb on Charlie: the divorce papers. Charlie, who was under the impression that Nicole would only be staying there temporarily, unravels as Nicole decides to use a lawyer in an effort to get Charlie to give in. What follows is a spiral of destructive behavior as both Charlie and Nicole fight to protect what they think they deserve.
Adam Driver excellently plays both, the self-made, dependable husband and the out-of-touch, borderline workaholic husband. He provides for his family, but doesn’t recognize the depth of his wife’s desires and is taken aback when her regrets finally surface. Scarlett Johansson admirably plays a wife with overpowering internal conflict. Though she acts on her feelings of regret, she is constantly pulled the other way with a nearly equal force of sympathy towards her husband.
The supporting characters are hit or miss. Nicole’s lawyer Nora, played by Laura Dern, made quite the impression with her feisty walk and talk, but it stole the spotlight away from the other characters and made her character come off as something of a jerk. This can be a good thing in some situations but it didn’t work here for me. On the other hand, Charlie’s lawyer Bert Spitz, played by Alan Alda, is the complete opposite: warm, experienced and a voice of reason. After his second minute of dialogue I was completely taken, and wouldn’t have minded if the entire film had proceeded to just have him tell jokes and drop nuggets of wisdom.
My roommate commented that the film was a tearjerker as I sat watching it on my TV. However, no tears were shed by either of us. Though there are scenes, involving silent parent-child interaction with non-diegetic music, that had the potential to make us cry, they were few and far between. That these scenes go underutilized is symbolic of a film whose screenplay has a tendency to get wrapped up in itself.
The film’s screenplay is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness as well. In some places, it stimulates your intellect and lends cerebral weight to the highly charged emotional drama. But in others the dialogue is so long-winded that it comes off as stylistic “movie-dialogue”, detracting from the realism, and placing the load completely on the actors to sell it. This is most apparent in a scene where feisty lawyer Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern) implores Scarlett to re-tailor her story to the judge. In a baleful monologue that probably secured her Best Supporting Actress Oscar, she draws a parallel between the parents of Jesus Christ and the double standards about a father’s and mother’s qualities. It’s an unnecessarily grandiose analogy; though it makes for great spectacle (read: movie-dialogue) and puts Laura’s acting talents on display, it doesn’t fit in with the realistic tone of the rest of the film.
Marriage Story is by no means a “brilliant” film, but it’s definitely one that works hard to portray a failing marriage between conflicted people. There’s no new insight to be gleaned: I’m sure any thinking human being will understand that no couple is ever completely agreeable and most divorces don’t involve vindictive spouses out to snatch everything the other one owns. It’s hard not to perceive Marriage Story as Oscar bait, especially given that this was produced by streaming giant Netflix. However, its earnestness and warmth in portraying spousal conflict doesn’t seem superfluous or self-serving, as most ‘Oscar bait’ films have a reputation of being.
If there’s any message I took away from this movie, it’s that love can find a way through even the most bitter conflicts. It’s a rosy and well worn idea, but there’s always an appetite for it. If you enjoy watching examinations of melancholia put on film and appreciate the acting range that big-name actors don’t normally get to portray in cookie cutter Disney films, then you’ll like Marriage Story. You’ll definitely enjoy it, but it may not be the tearjerker or the life-changing film you may expect it to be.
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