Film Review: Marriage Story
Marriage Story ends with two performances of songs from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. Actress Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) performs “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” with her mother and sister (Julie Hagerty and Merritt Wever) before a crowded room of people at a party in Los Angeles. Theatre director Charlie (Adam Driver) performs “Being Alive” at a mostly empty bar in New York. In the musical, “Crazy” is sung by three jilted lovers about a shared narcissistic ex. “Alive” is that same ex finally opening up to the prospect of love.
Neither performance is as acerbic or triumphant as they are in the musical. The events of the previous two hours gives even the happier performance of “Crazy” a tinge of melancholy. That melancholy is even more apparent in Driver’s single-take performance of “Alive.”
Driver and Johannsson each turn in the best performances of their careers. Their performances are heart wrenching, honest and open as victims of circumstances they helped create. They have immediate chemistry in both proverbial sickness and health, showing us why they spent 10 years and had a kid together and why the marriage needs to come crashing down.
But even as the marriage comes crashing down, their friendship and mutual respect need not, especially for the sake of their son Henry (Azhy Roberston). The pair try their hand at mediation and promise to one another that the process will happen without lawyers.
She walks out on the mediation and is pressed by a fellow divorcee to find a lawyer. Where a lesser director and writer would have treated this moment as a dour first act turn, Baumbach instead finds a bit of levity in it; the divorcee, who stills works with her ex in a funhouse mirror of Nicole and Charlie, speaks ill of him using choice words I won’t type here.
Baumbach finds the emotional complexity in almost every situation. Nicole still calls Charlie “honey” when they’re fighting in his hastily-rented and spare LA apartment. Nicole and Charlie tell a mediator what they love about each other…except Nicole hasn’t said a word.
Every actor in the film backs up the script with a stellar performance. Driver and Johannson both act just as much with their faces as they do with their voices. Shot in medium and close-up, both actors betray their characters’ real feelings as they try to figure out a process neither of them wanted or prepared for. Each character is flawed and human and the audience sees the good and the bad laid out.
The script doesn’t take sides. Charlie’s self-centeredness is the impetus for the divorce, but Nicole is the one threatening to tear the family apart. Charlie is a better husband in divorce than in marriage.
Marriage Story is one of my favorite films of 2019. Ask me in 2021, however, and that opinion may have changed. The film is wrenching and difficult, but it’s all a little too performative, much like the set pieces at the end. The tenderness and vulnerability are there, but they don’t seem genuine. The artificiality holds the film back from being a true all-time classic.
Final score: 9.2/10
