Review: Tortured Emotions from Tortured People in Noach Baumbach’s Emotional Devastation, ‘Marriage Story’
“I fell in love with him two seconds after I saw him… And I won’t stop no matter how little sense it makes.”
You ever see a film and feel connected to it? Like what you’re watching has something personal for you? As if the events on screen are lining up with your own and the realization that the themes are mirroring your experience? It’s like watching Frances Ha in your 20s and completely understanding the milieu before your 30s, or watching Lady Bird and accepting your home as a part of you before leaving for college. These films have an unspeakable fanaticism to them because they often come at the right time or in the right place, and if you’ve ever been in a relationship, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is going to be one of those films.
So bitingly true is this film in every statement. So tender and sincere in its address. So emotionally draining that your whole outlook on the most fundamental aspects of life are probably gonna change. Hyperbole? Perhaps, but I would be lying if this film wasn’t the most devastating romance film since Blue Valentine. There is a universality to Baumbach’s message that reaches into the heart of anyone who has felt the joys of love or the bitter sting of a breakup and smashes it into a million pieces with its honesty and truth, a truth you probably don’t want to hear but need to.
Divorce is at the onset for Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), the former a well regarded stage director and the later the starring muse. After years together, the two embark on divergent courses that bring them to separate parts of the country and to the opposite ends of a court room. With each phase of divorce, the two grow further and further apart, abandoning all civility as they fight they fight for their possessions, the custody of their son, and ultimately their own sense of self.
It’s a terrifying film. Not because it’s scary in the generic sense, but because of how it presents a scenario that is so emotionally burdensome that you hope you never have to go through it. Everything divorce touches corrodes, eating away at those involved and making them turn hostile where different circumstances would see otherwise. Charlie and Nicole are pushed towards destructive behavior in the midst of a long and arduous split neither of them expected, but something that escalates at the behest of their lawyers. Nicole slights Charlie, Charlie slights Nicole back, and the two engage in an all out war of attrition that destroys both of them financially and emotionally. But what Marriage Story does so well is how it preserves their humanity. This is not who they are, but rather behavior brought about by divorce. It asserts that these two individuals are hospitable, kind, and loving —especially to one another — but in a different time and place. Right now, they are hanging on by a thread, trying to preserve any semblance of life prior to separation, and coaxing out anger, frustration, and a bevy of other untempered emotions in the pursuit of legal action.
At the heart of all this is how Baumbach can make Nicole and Charlie feel so tangible. His prior work shows he can be lethal when it comes to writing authentic characters and he may very well reached his peak with Marriage Story. Presented in beautifully uncinematic ways, these characters behave as we do, not movie characters with artificial melodramatic flashes, but rather in ways where the cinematic barriers of disbelief start to come down. From Jessie Eisenberg’s sporadic outbursts in Squid and the Whale, to Nicole Kidman’s existential breakdown in Margot at the Wedding, to Greta Gerwig’s youthful confusion in Frances Ha, Baumbach’s characters are always deeply, deeply troubled right below the surface, and our understanding of this is due in large part to subdued dialog choices that don’t placate to our emotions — sorry Aaron Sorkin. Their behavior is real, and Nicole and Charlie represent the ultimate culmination and refinement of Baumabch’s authenticity.
Plus it helps that both Driver and Johansson give unreal complimentary performances. Nuanced doesn’t begin to describe how much pain and suffering they are pouring out on screen as their very core is being uprooted by divorce. Johansson — who herself entered divorce at the start of production— has a show stopping performance early on, and Driver has a ‘best-of-the-year’ moment when he sings a rendition of “Being Alive,” but near the climax of the film, when both Charlie and Nicole are drained emotionally, there is a scene they both share that is so piercing, so damaging, and so explosive that for four minutes you just cry. You cry at seeing two people taking the gloves off and going for blood, saying the most cutting, damning, and harmful things you could say to any person, and as an audience member, you just hurt.
You hurt because you’ve seen this before. This is you in a nasty break up and you see your malicious behavior on screen. But through all your tears, you finally come to understand the crux of Baumbach’s argument: that love evolves. For the last hour and a half, we’ve seen tortured emotions pour out of these tortured individuals not because they hate each other, but because they love each other so deeply. In spite of this divorce driving them apart, they suffer because they are inflicting pain on someone they truly care about, figuratively ripping themselves apart learning how to live under new terms. You know this. You understand this. And most importantly, you feel this experience. It is nothing if not the most real alignment to separations, and it has the effectivity to make you realize it.
Love and hate dance in bitter unison at the end of a relationship, and I became moved by Baumbach’s proposition that this new love is what is right. Even though you’ve separated and both caused pain at the hand of the other, there can still be love between divorcees, and that’s something so incredibly hard to accept, but a reality we hope to obtain. That even in separation, two people can talk to one another, be loving to one another, and even tie each other shoes when they need it . . . the sweetest of all realities.
—
