Movie Review : Marriage Story (2019)
There’s a lot of movies out there for people who haven’t found love yet and very few for people who did. I don’t know why that is, but the so-called happily ever after isn’t exactly smooth sailing. Lovers grow apart. Couples collapse under the weight of adult life. Pressure and responsibilities will test your character and get the better of you even if you’re prom royalty. Movies don’t prepare you for that. Well, movies that aren’t mumblecore deity Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. I liked it a lot. It takes a lot of balls to make a divorce movie and expect people to pay for it.
The plot is very simple and not. Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) are getting a divorce. They’re still very fond of each other, but Nicole is emancipating and coming into her own professionally and Charlie can’t seem to think of her that way. Everything in their couple revolves around his theater company and doesn’t understand why it suddenly shouldn’t be the case. Now, Nicole move to Los Angeles for her role, takes their son Henry (Azhy Robertson) with her and what used to be love becomes a lengthy and brutal legal battle.
Marriage Story won’t wow you with technical prowess or colorful creativity, but it will resonate with you if you’ve been intimately involved with someone at some point in your life. Being in a couple is like building something and when it comes crashing down, it’s not just a person you lose: it’s a way of life. It’s the little idiosyncrasies that make your life what it is. Noah Baumbach does a great job at showing it’s painful for Charlie, who’s life was a Shakespearean triumph and also to Nicole, who feels great guilt and terror at the idea of a future that might not pan out.
Moving through the motions of divorce, Noah Baumbach makes the most of the lawyer scenes and shows another way life can be horrible after losing someone you love. Charlie and Nicole’s respective lawyers both deform what they have to say about one another, because their interest lies in winning rather than in arranging something as convenient as possible for both parties. Marriage Story communicates very well how alone both characters feel in a world where the only people who care about the beautiful years they lived together is themselves. It’s heart-wrenching.
I had my issues with Marriage Story, though. Notably with Baumbach’s use of irony and ill-timed sense of humor. There’s nothing wrong with laughing in a movie that’s supposed to be sad. It’s emotional depth. But Marriage Story laughs at the expense of pretty much everyone except Charlie and Nicole. Everybody else (except for Nicole’s lawyer Nora) is a stereotype. Their very existence is meant to trigger a precise emotion in the audience and most times, it’s comic relief. That whole fling Nicole has with Pablo (Lucas Neff) is a wasted opportunity. It’s also not really funny.
Marriage Story is a very good movie. It’s one of the strongest Oscar nominee for Best Picture I’ve seen since Moonlight. It’s a vibrant and heartfelt portrait of what love really is and how true feelings can power through almost anything. It’s a little full of itself, but it’s a quirk you have to accept if you’re going to watch a Noah Baumbach movie. It’s not quite my favorite Oscar nominee for this year…. but almost and I’d be surprised if it doesn’t win. It has a weirdly niche audience, but it’s well worth watching if you’ve ever had a relationship that once defined who you were.
7.7/10
