Marriage Story

Netflix

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story reads like a play, through and through. Long shots, minimal cuts, and fade outs, making for an easily engaging watch. But not without deep troughs of nuance and vulnerability. The first act of this story feels like a walk in the park or a cozy weekend day on the couch with your better half. We find out why Nicole (Scarlett Johansson)- a film and stage actress- and Charlie (Adam Driver)- a theatre director- love each other through tender, voiced over sweeping shots of their life as a young family in New York. 

Nicole is cutting everyone’s hair, playing with their son- to which Charlie credits her as a mom who plays, “Really plays!”. And Charlie, loving everything you usually hate about being a dad, keeping the home chores done which Nicole relies on him for. This feeling of adoration swiftly ends, revealing these to be letters their divorce mediator asked them to write. We know they are good people and love each other, they’ve just found themselves in the throes of marriage. It is a story of a relationship that is evolving over the course of an attempt at an amicable divorce.

Laura Dern plays Nora Fanshaw and Ray Liotta plays Jay Marotta: Nicole and Charlie’s divorce lawyers respectively. Both give amazing performances in the first court scene, but Dern is a master in nuance as she introduces herself to Nicole under the guise of understanding gal pal. She toes off her pumps, cuddles up on the couch, and has her assistant bring them tea. Laura sits and listens to Nicole as she laments about the emotional and creative slog she finds herself in. Johansson’s pacing and blocking in this scene leave nothing to be desired. The closing shot is a close up on her, waxing poetic (though intensely moving and true) about wanting a “piece of earth” that belongs to her, and to have something truly her own.

The minimal cuts the film makes really allow the actors to marathon- not sprint- through the dialogue, finding a pace that highlights intense and intrinsic human emotion. Nicole and Charlie find themselves in a sans-child apartment, hurling obscenities at each other while discussing their separation. Both actors are able to pinpoint the boiling point of anger and tumult one can feel in a breakup and shatter the facade of amicability. Both become tragically vulnerable after using insults as ammunition for superiority over one another.

The film is interwoven with nuanced dialogue, blocking that makes you feel like you’re in the room, and makes you ache with a familiar sense of ‘how did we end up here?’. The tenderness Nicole and Charlie are able to have after the divorce is finalized is a lesson in care. In the closing scene, we see just how much care is left over.

Nicole realizes Charlie’s shoe is untied and runs over, bending down to tie it for him. Seemingly frivolous, but summed up in a quote from The Curious Savage by John Patrick. “People say I love you all the time - when they say, ‘take an umbrella, it’s raining,’ or ‘hurry back,’ or even ‘watch out, you’ll break your neck.’ There are hundreds of ways of wording it -

you just have to listen for it, my dear.”