Marriage Story
Noah Baumbach (2019)
Marriage Story, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and is now showing at the London one, will receive a limited theatrical release in early November before streaming on Netflix a month later. The Oscar buzz it’s getting is unprecedented for a Noah Baumbach movie. I’m glad because I like and admire his work – this is, in lots of ways, another good film. Yet his portrait of a young couple, with a child, going through divorce feels different from what Baumbach’s done before. He may well be drawing on upsetting personal experience but Marriage Story seems, more than its predecessors, designed to please and to showcase fine acting – factors traditionally conducive to awards. It’s worth remembering this year marks the fortieth anniversary of another divorce and tug-of-love story, Robert Benton’s multi-Oscar-winning Kramer vs Kramer.
Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) live in Brooklyn with their eight-year-old son Henry (Azhy Robertson). Charlie’s a theatre director. In his mid-twenties, he started up a group called Exit Ghost, whose avant-garde reputation has soared in the ten years since. Dedicated to his art, Charlie reinvests in the company any money that Exit Ghost productions happen to make. Nicole, born and raised in an acting family in Los Angeles, first became a name in a hit sex-comedy movie (‘All Over the Girl’). In the early days, Charlie acted as well as directed. The first time Nicole saw him was when, on a visit to New York, she saw him on stage. He seemed to be focusing on her in the audience, and it wasn’t an illusion. They quickly fell in love, married and had a child. Nicole switched to theatre work and became Charlie’s muse.
At the start of Marriage Story, Charlie, in voiceover, itemises his favourite things about Nicole. Her voice then returns the compliment(s). Baumbach puts on the screen brief, deft, often funny illustrations – at home with Henry, at work in the theatre – of the qualities the voices describe. The prologue is accompanied by Randy Newman’s sprightly music and concludes with a close-up of the list of Charlie’s good points that Nicole has written down. The music is replaced by silence and Baumbach cuts to a room where an unsmiling Nicole stares at what she’s written. She and Charlie are sitting at opposite ends of a sofa, facing a man who, it’s instantly clear, is a marriage mediator. He asked that they write down, and now asks that they read out, each other’s most appealing features. Nicole says she doesn’t want to. Charlie’s keen to voice what he’s written but the mediator stops him: the exercise has to be two-way. The conversation soon gets heated and Nicole walks out of the session. This is a highly effective opening. Baumbach presents the audience with evidence of a happy marriage then pulls the rug from under us; at the same time, we know, in a way that Nicole and Charlie don’t, what they like and love about each other.
At the other end of the film, when the divorce has gone through and with more-or-less shared custody of Henry agreed, Charlie arrives at Nicole’s mother’s home in Los Angeles to pick up his son. He finds him sitting in Nicole’s bedroom, reading. Henry’s been frustratingly slow learning to read so Charlie’s pleased with what he now sees and hears. He sits down on the bed beside the boy, who, it gradually dawns on Charlie, is reading from the notes Nicole refused to read at the start of the film. Charlie has to help with a few words; after a while, Henry asks him to take over the reading aloud, which Charlie does. While the camera is on his face, the blurred but unmistakable figure of Nicole appears in the doorway. One of Charlie’s virtues, according to Nicole, is that he cries easily and he duly obliges here. When Baumbach cuts to Nicole’s face, she too is in tears. Charlie doesn’t realise she’s there. He doesn’t know that Nicole knows that he now knows what she loves about him. Only Charlie still knows what he loves about her. Baumbach’s clever variation on his starting point is somehow diminished by its neatness.
This kind of shaping is characteristic of Marriage Story. The biggest, longest argument between Nicole and Charlie takes place in an as yet unfurnished apartment that he’s renting in LA. At the start of what turns into a showdown, the camera is at some distance from the characters – emphasising, from their relative positions in the room, how far they are from one another. By the time they’re going at it hammer and tongs, Baumbach has moved into tight close-ups. In the aftermath of the divorce, he has each of the principals perform a Stephen Sondheim number from Company. Nicole, in a threesome with her mother Sandra (Julie Hagerty) and sister Cassie (Merritt Wever), delivers the up-tempo ‘You Could Drive a Person Crazy’ to a celebratory gathering in LA: the guests include Nicole’s killer divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern). In a New York bar, the equivalent Exit Ghost assembly has a more melancholy atmosphere: Charlie grumbles, apologises for his self-pity, shambles to a microphone to sing the reflective, yearning ‘Being Alive’. I feel bad describing these sequences in Marriage Story as if they were defects. They’re not exactly that – they demand and display plenty of skill, in conception and execution. Yet they are, I think, limitations: they make you too aware of their artfulness.
The equality of Sondheim opportunity reflects one of the aspects of Marriage Story that distinguishes it most clearly from Kramer vs Kramer: Baumbach means to treat Nicole and Charlie more even-handedly than Robert Benton did Ted and Joanna Kramer. (Another difference between the films is running time. At 136 minutes, this new one is more than an half an hour longer – a bit too long, in fact.) I’m not sure, though, how deep Baumbach’s equity really goes. In her first meeting with Nora, Nicole has a long, meaty monologue, in which she explains why, from her point of view, the marriage has foundered. Charlie is self-absorbed, preoccupied with his theatre work. He’s a good father to Henry but has repeatedly avoided spending more time in Los Angeles, which Nicole has been keen to do. She instigates the separation, which takes effect when she moves back to California after getting a role in a TV series made there.
Nicole can see that ‘I never really came alive for myself – I was only feeding his aliveness’. Her speech in Nora’s office suggests the failure of the marriage is down to Charlie and little happens subsequently to belie Nicole’s characterisation of him. But once she’s said her piece, Marriage Story seems to be more about Charlie’s plight – even though the two leads have a comparable amount of screen time. There’s something of (what I think of as) Ingmar Bergman syndrome at work here. The male writer-director makes clear that a man is the guilty party yet can’t help feeling – and showing – the same man is also the more interesting party. It’s a peculiar interpretation of fair treatment. A similar bias is implicit in the sequences that contrast Charlie doing theatre in New York and Nicole television in Los Angeles – art vs commerce. If they don’t, in effect, show Charlie’s world to advantage, that’s because some of the theatre personnel, including an elderly name-dropping actor (Wallace Shawn), are a bit of a drag.
When they first decide to end their marriage, Nicole and Charlie intend to do so without lawyers. A colleague (Sarah Jones) on Nicole’s TV show urges her to get a lawyer – and to get Nora. The partnership is soon up and running, and lasts throughout the divorce proceedings. Charlie, off to a slower start, first sees the aggressively focused Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta) and his sidekick Ted (Kyle Bornheimer). The meeting doesn’t go well. (When Charlie mentions his theatre work, Jay asks, ‘Anything I’ve seen?’) So Charlie switches to veteran Bert Spitz (Alan Alda) – mild, affable but exasperating, especially with his mantra that they won’t need to go to court but should prepare as if they will. And they do. On the day of the hearing, Nicole and Nora are surprised by the appearance of Jay (and Ted), not Bert, at Charlie’s side. Make what you will of Bert’s generalisation that ‘Criminal lawyers see bad people at their best – divorce lawyers see good people at their worst’. The film says that cutthroat lawyers in a divorce case bring out the worst in everyone.
Marriage Story is a comedy-drama and Noah Baumbach shows again his gift for fusing the two, as distinct from simply alternating between them. Two scenes are particularly good examples. The first is the serving of divorce papers on Charlie, which takes place in Sandra’s kitchen. He’s about to arrive from New York. Nicole can’t serve the divorce papers herself and has entrusted the job to her sister. A less successful actress than Nicole, Cassie is consumed with nerves at the prospect of, as she sees it, failing another audition. When Charlie arrives, she and Sandra give him a hero’s welcome before Cassie clumsily thrusts the envelope into his hand. The versatile Merritt Wever (she’s excellent as a detective hunting a rapist in the very good Netflix serial Unbelievable) plays the scene with brilliant invention.
The second example is a more extended episode. An ‘evaluator’, appointed by the judge who hears the settlement-custody case, makes a visit to Charlie’s apartment to observe his interaction with his son. Charlie’s edginess during the visit is increased both by Henry’s uncooperative mood and by the awkward demeanour and monotone of the evaluator (beautifully played by Martha Kelly), who sits and watches and occasionally asks questions. Charlie prepares and serves an evening meal. Henry objects to each of its components. The evaluator sits at the table with them and her glass of water – foodless, in spite of Charlie’s invitation to join them in the meal. Henry asks if Charlie’s going to do ‘the knife thing’; once his son’s gone back to his room to play, Charlie feels obliged to explain and demonstrate this to the evaluator. Nicole once bought him a key ring with a mini-knife attachment. The trick Henry enjoys is when Charlie pretends he’s cut himself with the blade, having already retracted it. He now bungles the ‘knife thing’, nicking his forearm. He assures the alarmed evaluator he’s fine. When she cluelessly tries to exit, Charlie has to help, smearing the apartment door red as he does so. Once she’s gone (‘Thanks for the water’), he tries one-handed first aid in the kitchen. He sinks to the floor, defeated, in a tangle of paper towels.
Baumbach writes wonderful dialogue, fluently witty but natural-sounding too. You sense how much the high-powered cast love delivering it. In the show-stopping war of words in the bare room, Nicole and Charlie, as they get angrier, throw increasingly hurtful accusations at each other. As the to-and-fro reaches its climax, they hardly mean what they’re saying but the momentum of argument impels them to say it. (The scene functions virtually as a summary of what the aggressive legal process is forcing them to do.) Adam Driver, in particular, makes the highly constructed exchange believable. Throughout the film, his playing is dexterously supple, especially in line readings. Scarlett Johansson gives a strong, convincing performance but hasn’t the same vocal or emotional variety (which rather reinforces the impression that Marriage Story is giving Charlie more than a fair crack of the whip).
Nora Fanshaw is a lulu of a supporting role. Laura Dern seizes it not just with both hands but, it seems, with every bone in her long, elegant body and every syllable she utters: it’s a spectacular turn. Nora is as heartlessly competitive as she’s cogently feminist and fast-talking: Nicole would have happily settled for equal custody of Henry; her lawyer, without consulting her, clinches a 55%-45% deal for Nicole – and a clearer win for herself. Dern manages to make Nora seem just as lethal when she’s doing amiable small talk – accepting Nicole’s compliments on the coffee and cantuccini Nora serves her clients, ordering sandwiches during pre-court settlement negotiations with Charlie’s team. Bert and Jay are obviously designed chalk and cheese but Alan Alda and Ray Liotta do them very well.
In spite of its excessive length, Marriage Story is consistently entertaining. I enjoyed it a lot but kept feeling irritated too. It took some time to put my finger on why but the light dawned at the end of the courtroom scene. Nora and Jay have been arguing at full tilt for some time when the judge intervenes to say he’s going to call proceedings to a halt and send in an evaluator before confirming settlement terms. In doing so, he draws attention to a court ‘full of people with fewer resources than you’ and I thought ‘hear hear’. It’s not that Charlie and Nicole are wealthy. Just before the divorce papers are served, Charlie learns he’s been awarded a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’. This will make a big difference to his career; he’s aghast that the grant might be held financially against him and factored into the settlement. The hot-shot lawyers’ fees break the bank for both him and Nicole. Yet the couple are relatively very privileged – in their standard of living, their intelligence and the creative work they do.
At the end, they’re reconciled to the point of affectionate civility but there’s no suggestion, in spite of that bedroom scene with Nicole’s notes, that they didn’t have good reason to divorce. The outcome is meant to be heartbreaking and it’s already clear that many people are moved by Marriage Story. I’m not among them. Baumbach concentrates on what happens after Nicole and Charlie have decided to separate – at the expense of showing, as opposed to stating, the grounds for the break-up. As a result, their marital differences don’t seem irreconcilable. The film is being praised as an essential-story-for-our-times and Noah Baumbach’s protagonists may indeed be a typical Western middle-class couple of their generation. They choose to end a marriage that’s imperfect rather than impossible.
6 October 2019