Noah Baumbach’s latest film, Marriage Story, has a few moments; I think I will return again and again.
A blistering monologue from Scarlett Johansson describes how love spreads; A stunning musical performance from Adam Driver; A fight between them which is one of the most annoying depictions of the couple verbally clarifying each other.
As soon as it hits Netflix, which is producing and distributing the film on December 6, I can only imagine that I will pin the timestamp so that I can hope in these scenes that my heart is once again Has ripped from my body.
The Marriage Story tells, in gruesome detail, how the story of Nicole (Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) ends their marriage. When we meet him – he is a theater director, he is the star performer in his company – he has already decided that they are going to separate.
There is bitterness between them, but the proceedings are largely cordial. They want to divide everything equally and avoid using lawyers.
But when Nicole leaves New York to shoot a television pilot for Los Angeles and takes her child, Henry, with her, the sight of a life he didn’t pursue in the city seems to illuminate him is.
She hires a high-powered divorce lawyer (calls Laura Dern absolutely zero nonsense) and wants her to get what she wants: to have her child in Los Angeles where she can find her family and May possess its ideal career. Charlie, meanwhile, is stubborn for New York, the place where he lived for the majority of Henry’s childhood.
Interestingly, neither Nicole nor Charlie became the main antagonists during the wear in the film; Baumbach did not pass judgment on either party.
They are equally wrong and right. Nicole has spent years vying for Charlie’s will, which lies in the shadow of his “talent”, for which he wins the MacArthur Grant.
Charlie, on the other hand, is deeply disappointed that Nicole wants to move her child across the country, the idea of a home away from her. And once the legal system is incorporated, their differences increase and their common coexistence becomes almost identical.
Baumbach’s screenplay states that the very business of getting divorced – this is economics – make people forget why they loved each other in the first place. But the saga he is telling is not without hope.
The messy experience of splitting also forces their characters to live more honestly. It checks the breakdown of these people before they put themselves back together in a slightly different order.
In the midst of the grisly divorce talk, Baumbach writes a lot about his specific prudence – thinking about his other fantastic piece about divorce, The Squid, and the Whale. Although the driver and Johansson are emotionally heavy-handed, orbiting the characters reveals a fundamental inattention to the cast’s position.
Dern received applause at mid-screening during the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere, giving a stunning speech about the biblical burden imposed on women.
An early scene with Merritt Weaver and Julie Hegarty as Nicole’s sister and mother is a positively voracious one that serves divorce papers to someone including accents, pies, and popping.
Nevertheless, the power of the film lies in the hands of Johansson and the driver. For the former, it is a stunning return to theatrical work that has defined the early part of her career and is elucidated by her recent superheroes. She finds Nicole as a woman who is both heartbroken and excited by the ability to reclaim her sense of self in this new chapter.
Meanwhile, Driver’s performance makes him one of the most powerful actors of his generation. In his hands, Charlie is combustible, a good person who is not completely sympathetic either.
It all ends when he stands in front of his colleagues and calls Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive” a song from the music company that says “to keep someone very close, someone to hurt me very deeply.” For “.
