Written and directed by Noah Baumbach
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Merritt Weaver
MPAA rating: R for language throughout and sexual references
Running time: 2 hours and 16 minutes

by Fiona Underhill

The Year of Adam Driver™ has, so far, provided us with the eclectic delights of political thriller The Report (shortly heading to Amazon Prime), Terry Gilliam’s long-awaited The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (still my film of the year thus far), Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die and now Noah Baumbach’s divorce drama for Netflix - Marriage Story. The year will of course round-out with Driver returning as Kylo-Ren in the last in the Star War sequel trilogy. Some might say that five films from one actor in one year is too many and to them I say, if it’s an actor of the caliber of Driver, ten films a year isn’t enough. As someone who has been eagerly watching him since the TV show Girls started in 2012 and experienced his devastating arc in that show, which plays out across the decade, each new Driver film has been a gift. He has worked with everyone from the Coens to Scorsese and collaborated with Baumbach on three previous films, making him pretty much the male version of Greta Gerwig.

Considering all of this and how well-reviewed it’s been, my anticipation for Marriage Story was very high. Noah Baumbach explores his divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh through this introspective work, with Driver playing New York theater director Charlie. His wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) is an actress who has starred in most of his productions and they have an eight year old son, Henry (Azhy Robertson). The film starts with them in couples counselling, so things have already started to unravel. Nicole takes a job on a TV pilot in Los Angeles and takes Henry with her. There, she hires a crack-shot divorce lawyer (Laura Dern) and when Charlie visits, she gets her sister Cassie (the brilliant Merritt Weaver) to serve him the divorce papers. The divorce then becomes increasingly bitter and things become increasingly embattled, as Charlie tries to insist that they come back to New York and Nicole says she wants them to live in LA.

It should go without saying that the acting is exemplary. Scarlett Johansson has been getting herself into hot water in recent years, with controversial casting choices (eg. Ghost in the Shell) and public statements (eg. defending Woody Allen). However, she has really impressed, performance-wise, this year in both JoJo Rabbit (regardless of your opinions on the film as a whole) and now Marriage Story – an award next year would not be unmerited. The supporting cast – especially Dern, Alan Alda (as Charlie’s mild-mannered lawyer) and Weaver are all excellent. The only bum-note, really, is Julie Hagerty as Nicole’s mother (although probably over 50% of the fault here lies in how she is written, which I’ll get to in a moment). 

Another positive is the cinematography, by frequent Andrea Arnold-collaborator Robbie Ryan, which is much more thoughtful and beautiful than a film like this needs to be. It combines incredibly well with the production design by Jade Healy (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, I Tonya, A Ghost Story), which really emphasizes the depressing temporary environments Charlie finds himself in when he’s in LA: a hotel room, a bachelor’s apartment, his lawyer’s shabby office. There is also a side-office in the courtroom, where he lets out his first sobs – the way Ryan frames this scene boxes Charlie into a corner, echoing his feeling of being completely trapped by the escalating war between the lawyers.

This film contains one of the best – and most excruciating – scenes of the year. A woman is sent to Charlie’s apartment to observe him having dinner with Henry (something she also does with Nicole, but we don’t see it). Something Baumbach does extremely well is highlight tiny, well-observed details, such as Charlie adding unfamiliar garnish to the meal in order to impress her. I honestly had to watch this entire scene through my fingers, the level of awkwardness was so realistic and extreme. This scene has such an unexpectedly hilarious and gruesome denouement, it is a definite highlight of the film as a whole.

On the flip-side, Baumbach’s writing (which can be so good at times) is uneven and, although you can tell he is at pains to provide a balanced story to give Charlie and Nicole an equal voice, I’m afraid that this film is unfair to Nicole in several key ways. By making this an over-simplistic New York-vs-LA battle, with all the usual eye-rolling shade being thrown at LA and by giving Nicole a hyper, kooky family of actors, Charlie definitely comes across as the more stable and rational one of the pair. He initially hires a much more reasonable lawyer and it is only in response to Nicole’s lawyer being out for blood that he ramps things up by hiring Jay (Ray Liotta). Also, most of the film takes place in LA, where Charlie is a fish-out-of-water and audience sympathy is built for him, as he is the one fighting for more time with his kid, while living in crappy temporary accommodation. 

The most grating example of the imbalance in how the two characters are treated is when, in quick succession, Nicole sings a song from Stephen Sondheim’s Company, followed by Charlie singing a song from the same musical. Nicole sings “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” with her mother and sister in a twee performance that includes ridiculous actions. For those of us not overly-familiar with the musical, all we’re seeing and hearing here is three women singing a song about being crazy, while acting crazy. This is followed up by Charlie consoling with his theater troupe in a bar in New York about how hard the divorce has been on him and then he gets to launch into a heartfelt, tear-inducing, beautiful rendition of “Being Alive.” With its lyrics such as “someone know me too well” and “someone hurt me too deep,” Baumbach is clearly making parallels with what Charlie is going through. 

[Spoiler Warning: I’m about to describe a scene in some detail, which you may want to avoid if you haven’t seen the film yet] 

Nicole cries frequently during the course of the film, usually with silent tears falling, which she tries to hide from Henry. Charlie does something more commonly associated with men – he tries to hold it all together and occasionally emotions burst out. There is an absolutely devastating argument that the couple have in Charlie’s new apartment, with its bare walls making every word echo and resonate even more harshly. Charlie gets a moment of catharsis at the end of this (expressing his anger through a punch to the wall and breaking down in sobs while clinging to Nicole’s legs) which Nicole never gets, as she handles her emotions better (something we expect from women). Dern’s ‘badass’ lawyer Nora makes a feminist speech, which feels a lot like Baumbach being at pains to be considerate to the women in his life, but he would have been better-served writing Nicole’s character more sympathetically, rather than shoe-horning in a speech about the Virgin Mary and the absent-father, God.

A final, but important, bug-bear which I can’t stop thinking about is that costume designer Mark Bridges (who has worked on many Paul Thomas Anderson projects, including Phantom Thread) puts Nicole in truly, astoundingly awful clothes. Again, I believe this is a misguided attempt by Baumbach to be feminist. He is saying “Nicole is an actress, but she doesn’t care how she looks! So we’ll give her short hair and dowdy clothes!” To me, this feels completely false for the character and her clothes in the afore-mentioned devastating argument scene are so bad (beige cardigan, brown too-short flared pants and TERRIBLE shoes), they took me out of the scene. The only time she is allowed to be sexy is when she dresses as “Let’s Dance”-era David Bowie for Halloween.

Also: the Randy Newman score was a massive misfire for me and, again, was hugely distracting. I can’t comprehend the rationale behind having one of Newman’s signature saccharine-sweet, sentimental scores for a film like this. The only reason I can imagine is that it maybe fits with the slight “musical” theme to the film. But it absolutely did not work for me.

Marriage Story has been one of my most highly-anticipated films of the year and it brings me no pleasure to point out its flaws, but it is a frustratingly mixed bag. I can see and hear the effort Baumbach has gone to in order to present a balanced view of a divorce, but he doesn’t go far enough with Nicole and there are several instances where he’s done her dirty. This film is absolutely still worth watching, for the incredible acting and many scenes which are well-written, as well as the excellent cinematography and production design. Unfortunately, the costume design, the score and (at times) the writing, really hamper the viewing-experience and may leave you stewing over Scarlett Johansson’s shoes for days afterwards!