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Divorce is described in Noah Baumbach ’s masterful “Marriage Story” as like a death without a body. Something has been lost. There is grieving, anger, denial. In his personal and moving story, Baumbach captures the insidious nature of divorce, how two well-meaning people who still care about each other will do things they would never think they would do. Surely, you’re not the kind of person who would use secrets as a weapon in a divorce case? You wouldn’t turn a child against a parent to gain an advantage? It’s other people who do stuff like that. With remarkable grace and compassion for his characters, Baumbach portrays divorce as a great equalizer, turning us into versions of ourselves we didn’t expect to become. 

Baumbach opens with each of his protagonists reading a piece they wrote for a mediator that highlights the strengths of their partner. So we hear about the personality of Nicole ( Scarlett Johansson ), someone who listens too long to strangers, loves playing with her son Henry, cares for her mother and sister a great deal, and never closes a cabinet. Charlie ( Adam Driver ) is a focused theatre director who is remarkably talented and creative. He eats like someone is going to steal his food from him and is overly competitive. These may seem like nothing details, but they reveal the depth of specificity throughout “Marriage Story.” Baumbach is not interested in a film that tells every story of divorce, he wants to get this one exactly right. Charlie and Nicole are as fully realized as two people in a domestic drama have been in years.

And, despite some surprising bits of humor, this is very much a domestic drama. There have been a few separations in the past, but it appears that this one is going to take when Nicole goes to Los Angeles to film a pilot and takes their son with her. When Charlie goes to visit, she delivers the papers, as advised by her high-powered attorney Nora ( Laura Dern ). Charlie soon realizes that Nicole wants to move to L.A. with their son, and this becomes a major tug-of-war for the two of them. He has to constantly go back and forth between a play he’s trying to stage in New York and the increasingly rancorous proceedings in L.A. And everyone starts to fracture and become different versions of the people they were before.

It would have been so easy to make a version of this story in which there’s an obvious villain—put us on one side and allow us to root for an outcome. What Baumbach is exploring is the truth that there is no “good” outcome in divorce. There's rarely a way to make everyone happy. Sure, Charlie cheated and ignored Nicole’s needs, but she’s also basically trying to steal his son to the other side of the country. Some will pick a side, but I firmly believe that the movie works better if you don’t—if you can see the good and evil in both Nicole and Charlie. 

And it’s easy to do that with these stunning performances. Driver and Johansson have both been remarkable before, but this is a new career watermark for both, repaying Baumbach’s trust in them with emotional and complex work. They’re good throughout, but they each get a “scene” on their own—a background speech from Nicole when she first goes to Nora and a breathtaking one from Charlie at a bar near the end—and a scene together, the big fight that we never think will happen with our partners. The one where we say what we shouldn’t say. The one where things change forever.

The two leads own the film, but Baumbach’s skill with ensemble has become remarkable over the years, and this is his best work. There are minor parts from great performers like Merritt Wever , Wallace Shawn , and Ray Liotta , along with a memorable supporting turn by Alan Alda as Charlie’s attorney, an old soul who has seen the pain divorce can cause (he’s had three of them). And then there’s Dern, who continues to stake her claim as one of the best working actresses. Even she gets a “scene”—this one about the gender inequality in the way women and men are portrayed in divorce—that tears the house down.

In 2005, Baumbach made a film that’s essentially about the divorce of his parents called “ The Squid and the Whale .” That was from a child’s perspective. Almost 15 years later, it feels like he’s matured to a point where he’s willing to see the issue from the other side. And whereas that film has some notable anger, this one feels much more compassionate and understanding of human fallibility—the product of a mature, masterful filmmaker. What comes through in every frame of this film is that Baumbach loves Nicole and Charlie. And we come to care about them a great deal too. When we say goodbye to this pair, we hope that they both find happiness, reaching for life after the death of divorce. 

This review was filed from the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10th. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Marriage Story (2019)

136 minutes

Scarlett Johansson as Nicole

Adam Driver as Charlie

Laura Dern as Nora Fanshaw

Merritt Wever as Cassie

Mark O'Brien as Carter

Azhy Robertson as Henry

Brooke Bloom as Mary Ann

Julie Hagerty as Sandra

Amir Talai as Amir

• Noah Baumbach

Cinematographer

• Robbie Ryan
• Jennifer Lame
• Randy Newman

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• Noah Baumbach’s <i>Marriage Story</i> Understands That No One Outside a Marriage Can Know the Truth of It

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story Understands That No One Outside a Marriage Can Know the Truth of It

I n the days when movie stars used to appear in mainstream melodramas made for grownups—when we used to have mainstream melodramas made for grownups—it meant something to watch suffering play out on a deeply familiar face. Joan Crawford, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, William Holden: With their charisma and their carriage, in their Hollywood-royalty clothes, these people were spectacular and special creatures—surely, they couldn’t be as susceptible to emotional torment as we mere mortals are. But then, as you watched them in character, you’d see their hearts breaking or their spirits being crushed, and the sting was acute. They reminded you that no one is too beautiful to feel pain.

That’s the effect of watching Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, two of our own most appealing modern movie stars, in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s canny and cutting Marriage Story, a Netflix release playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival. Johansson and Driver play Nicole and Charlie, the two halves of a disintegrating couple: He’s a smart, modestly successful theater director about to debut his first show on Broadway. She’s his star actor, enormously gifted but overshadowed by her husband’s ambition and outsized confidence, both of which shine right through his aw-shucks demeanor. Nicole and Charlie have a son together, Henry (Azhy Robertson), whom they clearly adore. But things have gone jaggedly wrong between them. Nicole is about to leave the family’s home in New York for Los Angeles, where she’ll be filming a TV pilot—it’s a big deal for her, a chance to break off a little piece of fame for herself, though she senses Charlie looks down on the project. (He kind of does.) She’ll be taking Henry with her, and although the understanding is that the two will return to New York after her work is done, the act of dissolving the marriage is already in progress.

Nicole and Charlie have made it clear to each other and to everyone else that their split is going to be friendly and breezy, with minimal impact on Henry. But once Nicole reaches Los Angeles, the proceedings escalate. She connects with an almost diabolically shrewd divorce lawyer, Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern, in a performance as cleanly chiseled as her collarbones), who reassures her that this split can be everything that she desires—but that she should also get as much as she can, moneywise and custody-wise, out of the deal.

Charlie doesn’t know what hit him; actually, it takes forever for him to realize that anything has hit him at all. He attempts to hire an expensive shark of a lawyer (a disarmingly intense Ray Liotta), only to back off in favor of a sweetpea old-timer (Alan Alda, characteristically affable) who’s more in tune with his own trusting nature. Before long, Charlie and Nicole are barely speaking, and Nora, speaking in savvy lawyerese cloaked in the soothing tones of a self-help guru, is calling the shots. The savagery seems one-sided at first, driven mostly by Nicole’s desire to stay in Los Angeles and keep her son with her—you wonder when Charlie is going to stop walking around with that invisible “Kick me!” sign taped to his back. There’s a way in which Baumbach seems to want to tip the scales of sympathy toward the guy in the story—Nicole’s behavior sometimes comes off as a little too ruthless.

But Charlie finally gets the full picture, and realizes that no matter what, he wants his son to know he fought for him. And if Baumbach has, until this point, only signaled that these two characters will inflict great damage and pain upon one another, this is where he really opens the door to the sufferdome. Driver’s features are rubbery, agile, insanely likable—he’s got the kind of nose babies love to grab. To see Charlie close down—to see his face as swollen as a thundercloud with anguish and anger—is to see a movie star channel the very things we’ve all, at one time or another, struggled to banish or at least suppress. Driver ferries Baumbauch’s super-cerebral script—Baumbach could never not be cerebral —to a place beyond thinking, where raw emotion becomes an entropic, hurricane swirl.

Johansson’s mode is different but no less affecting. Her face is as expressive as Driver’s, but she sends feeling out in packets of light—one minute she bathes you in a pale, warm nightlight glow, a reassurance that all is right with the world; the next might be a power-surge flash, as if some unseen, wrathful goddess were sending lightning bolts to Earth through her fingertips. But mostly, Nicole guards her feelings more closely than Charlie does, and her subterranean vulnerability is like a heartbeat you can see. Baumbach is working with an ace cinematographer here, Robbie Ryan, who opens up a great deal of air around Johansson—uncrowded, she’s free to move and breathe, putting every emotional color on display.

Nicole and Charlie spar and claw at each other, drawing figurative blood if not the real kind. (At one point, Charlie semi-inadvertently slices into one of his own veins.) Their mutual antagonism is wrenching to watch because they, and Baumbach, have already shown us what things were like in better times. The movie’s opening is a catalog of the types of things that, in the best circumstances, can keep people bonded for life. Before seeing a marriage arbitrator, Charlie and Nicole have been asked to draw up a list of things that each loves about the other, and we hear these lists read in the character’s voices. “He’s very clear about what he wants, unlike me, who can’t always tell,” Nicole says of Charlie. Charlie praises Nicole’s generosity, her ability to feel everything so deeply. “She cuts all our hair,” he adds, and in an accompanying flashback we see her in action, going to work with the scissors as wisps of her loved ones’ hair fall to the floor. The image is so casual and quotidian that it nearly destroys you. This is what a marriage looks like when it works. But you can never adequately capture what destroys a marriage, because that unpredictable beast is the most camera-shy of gremlins.

When Marriage Story was announced, beard-strokers everywhere—even those with no literal beards to stroke—mused that this movie must surely be drawn from Baumbach’s experience splitting with his former wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, with whom he has a child. Of course! Probably. Why not? Baumbach has already made one autobiographical work, in 2005, with The Squid and the Whale , drawn from his experience of his parents’ divorce when he was a child ; it’s hardly unthinkable that he might make another. But if Baumbach has embedded any deeply personal elements in Marriage Story, they feel more like open secrets than confessional revelations. I suspect almost anyone who has dissolved a seemingly perfect union can relate to at least some of Marriage Story, especially if there are children involved. As a filmmaker, Baumbach’s smartest move here is that he never explains exactly how or what went wrong between these two, people whose sine waves seem as in sync as a pair of dolphins swimming in the sea. No one outside a marriage can know the truth of it; that’s a secret meant only for those inside. If you think you can squeeze a camera in there, you’re an endoscopic surgeon, not a filmmaker—and Baumbach would be the first to tell you he’s just the latter.

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Marriage Story First Reviews: Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver Shine in Noah Baumbach's Best Film Yet

Critics say the film is packed with great dialogue, surprising humor, and nuanced performances, and it's reminiscent of everything from kramer vs. kramer to jurassic park . yes, jurassic park ..

The latest from auteur filmmaker Noah Baumbach , his second for Netflix, premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday to a combination of discomfort and laughter. Marriage Story is a tale of divorce starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson that’s clearly semi-autobiographical, and to the majority of critics in attendance, it’s also a personal triumph for the director. This is likely to be an awards contender for at least members of the ensemble cast, and maybe the screenplay. Still, if you’re not a fan of Baumbach, this might not change your mind.

Here’s what critics are saying about Marriage Story :

How does it compare to Baumbach’s other work ?

Arguably Baumbach’s opus, his best film to date. –  Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

[It’s] easily the wisest film of his career, one that’s only sharpening. –  Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

It is Baumbach’s funniest, most fine-grained picture since 2012’s Frances Ha . –  Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

With Marriage Story , Baumbach cements his reputation as one of this generation’s leading humanist filmmakers. –  Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

This is the work of a filmmaker in full command of his powers. –  Jon Frosch, Hollywood Reporter

Marriage Story is the Noah Baumbach movie we’ve been waiting for. It’s better than good; it’s more than just accomplished… this, at long last, is Baumbach’s breakthrough into the dramatic stratosphere. –  Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Will his fans like it ?

[It] develops a unique tone that even Baumbach fans may not fully recognize at first… Marriage Story reflects a new level of narrative sophistication. –  Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Yes, this is another movie about the misadventures of relatively wealthy, straight white people. That may, understandably, put some people off. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Those who find themselves impatient with Baumbach’s cozy self-reflective world of pampered middle-class intellectuals will not take any comfort here. – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

(Photo by Netflix)

How is the script?

Baumbach’s brilliant screenplay never falters or hits a wrong note… he writes scenes that are like verbal arias. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Expertly scripted by Baumbach as a showcase for subtle, natural monologuing. – Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

Marriage Story is at its best when it just the two leads talking in a room. – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

Baumbach has a real knack for witty, eccentric and yet natural-sounding dialogue – something which  Marriage Story  definitely lives up to. – Thomas Humphrey, ScreenAnarchy

Is it reminiscent of any other films ?

Kramer vs. Kramer , Scenes from a Marriage , and Shoot the Moon … Marriage Story makes a worthy addition to that canon. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

You may be reminded of  Kramer vs. Kramer , but that movie, for all its fireworks, was lopsided. – Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

Not since David Fincher’s Zodiac has a movie placed such absorbing emphasis on the jigsaw puzzle of searching for solutions that may never fully resolve themselves. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

The film that came to mind while watching Noah Baumbach’s punishingly incisive dissection of a messy break-up and divorce was… in fact Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park . – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

I was often reminded of Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale , a film I can watch multiple times and always find myself siding and empathizing with a different member of a combative, dysfunctional family. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Like Ingmar Bergman’s  Scenes from a Marriage  — an inevitable influence — this is a tough piece of work, steeped in pain. – Jon Frosch, Hollywood Reporter

Will it make us all feel miserable?

Somehow, in spite of the bleakness of the subject matter, it feels more redemptive than despairing. – Geoffrey Macnab, Independent

It’s wrenching stuff to be sure, but it’s also excruciatingly funny, loaded with empathy, compassion, and understanding. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Tonally, the film is mostly upbeat: Adam Driver makes for the nicest, friendliest, most lovable gaslighter in the history of cinema. – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

Baumbach seeks to mine his material for laughs, no matter how desperate the situation becomes. – Xan Brooks, Guardian

Marriage Story  puts you through the wringer, but leaves you exhilarated at having witnessed a filmmaker and his actors surpass themselves. – Jon Frosch, Hollywood Reporter

Does Baumbach do a good job mixing tones?

Baumbach performs a brilliant balancing act. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Sometimes the film’s erratic zaniness undermines the gnarly vérité of its darker moments, but mostly  Marriage Story  is well balanced. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Baumbach finds the perfect blend of humor, humanity, heart and yes, suffering, to create an utterly compelling, harrowingly three-dimensional portrait of divorce. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Speaking of balance, is the story one-sided?

Marriage Story may often resemble a tug of war between its stars, but it’s on both of their sides. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

Some will say  Marriage Story  favors Charlie… but Baumbach is at once hard on, and forgiving of, the two characters, and audience sympathies will likely seesaw. – Jon Frosch, Hollywood Reporter

Put it this way, in its core DNA, when it drifts off to sleep at night, Marriage Story ’s true heart is in New York (Baumbach’s home), not L.A. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

There’s a way in which Baumbach seems to want to tip the scales of sympathy toward the guy in the story—Nicole’s behavior sometimes comes off as a little too ruthless. – Stephanie Zacharek, Time

It’ll be interesting to see what side you come out on… whether or not you come out feeling that one side wins too heavily over the other in the war for your sympathy. – Thomas Humphrey, ScreenAnarchy

How are the performances ?

Johansson delivers brilliantly textured work. – Xan Brooks, Guardian

[Johansson’s] ability to carry some of the movie’s more frustrating showdowns illustrate her capacity to look stern and fragile at once. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Driver, in particular, the stand-out MVP if you had to name just one of the leads. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Props especially go to Adam Driver, who at times is the best I have yet seen him. – Thomas Humphrey, ScreenAnarchy

Driver gives a bold performance… his choices add great depth to the role as written: he would seem a natural for awards attention here. – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

Both manage to outdo themselves. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

The sensational leads deliver the deepest, most alive and attuned performances of their careers. – Jon Frosch, Hollywood Reporter

Both have major awards potential. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Are there any other standouts?

A phenomenal Laura Dern. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

One of the pleasures here lies in three tremendous performances from Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta as the LA lawyers who represent the couple. – Geoffrey Macnab, Independent

Alda’s real-life Parkinson’s tremors fuel what may be his saddest performance. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

All hail Julie Hagerty, utterly sublime as Nicole’s ditzy pant-suited wine mom. – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

Robertson eschews any and all artificial cute-kid tics and delivers a genuine performance. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Are there any big complaints?

The film can sometimes manipulate events into scenarios which aren’t entirely convincing. – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

Marriage Story   definitely doesn’t always get it right. It’s not entirely tonally pitch perfect. – Thomas Humphrey, ScreenAnarchy

Will it affect our own marriage?

It’s well worth your time. Maybe don’t watch it with your spouse, though. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Marriage Story also serves as a kind of horror movie preview, an inadvertent cautionary tale, that leaves you rushing to get home to your partner and treat them as well as possible for as long as possible. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Marriage Story  premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 29, 2019. It will open in limited theatrical release on November 6 and be available to stream on Netflix on December 6.

Marriage Story (2019) 95%

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End Times in “Terminator: Dark Fate” and “Marriage Story”

By Anthony Lane

Of the many charms of the “Terminator” franchise, the most delightful is the emergence of a new etiquette. Once Homo sapiens and Homo roboticus begin to interact, and once time ceases to be something that you waste or spend and becomes a portal through which you pass, the language of social custom shifts accordingly. Thus, in the latest installment, “Terminator: Dark Fate,” one character says to another, “When are you from?” Better still, because it’s uttered by Arnold Schwarzenegger , is the exquisite line “May I ask what you are?”

The director is Tim Miller, though the name that shines out from the credits is that of James Cameron , who is listed as a producer and as one of five contributors to the story. The first two “Terminator” films, in 1984 and 1991, were directed by Cameron alone, and, after his departure, the ensuing movies—“Terminator: Rise of the Machines” (2003), “Terminator Salvation” (2009), and “Terminator Genisys” (2015)—are widely held to have suffered a process of gradual decay, like unrefrigerated fish. Much is expected, then, from the return of the king.

The action starts with a grainy clip of a scene from “ Terminator 2: Judgment Day ,” in which the heroine, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), ranted about a looming apocalypse. Thanks to her intervention, it was averted, but we now learn of a reloom—a second-generation disaster, in which cyborgs spawned by an A.I. program called Legion will get seriously futuristic on the world’s ass. The good news is that Sarah’s back, and hellbent, once again, on stopping the horror before it happens. What she’s been doing in the interim is unclear, though my guess is that she’s been rehearsing her heavy-weapons drill and, to judge by her voice, smoking forty Camels a day.

The plot consists of heated-up leftovers from the first three “Terminator” films. An unrelenting android, Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna), is dispatched from the years to come and lands in the present day, his duty being to destroy a young Mexican woman, Dani (Natalia Reyes), for reasons as yet unrevealed. Against him are arrayed the following: Sarah, who brings along a rocket launcher as you or I would pack an energy drink; Grace (Mackenzie Davis), who is like any other human, only more so, having been “augmented,” as she says, with superior powers; and a grizzled old geezer named Carl (Schwarzenegger), who lives near Laredo, Texas, with his family and runs a business making drapes. When you hear how decisive Carl can be with his customers—“The guy wanted solid-color blocks for his little girl’s bedroom, and I said, ‘ Don’t do it ’ ”—you wonder vaguely what he did before.

Schwarzenegger is oddly touching and funny here, but don’t take my word for it. Take his. “I’m reliable, I’m a very good listener, and I’m extremely funny,” he says, with a face of steel. Having been a killer in the first film and a protector in the second, he is now steered into a wholly novel groove. I don’t buy those changes for a moment, though I applaud the effort, whereas poor Rev-9 is, if anything, a downgrade from T-1000, the villain in “Judgment Day.” Both can assume any guise and, when smashed or shredded, mold themselves back into shape; the difference is that, whereas the earlier model was like quicksilver, the new one appears to be made of molasses. If you attacked him with self-rising flour, two eggs, and a handful of raisins, you could turn him into a fruitcake.

Despite the déjà vu, there is plenty to savor in Miller’s film, and the final third, in particular, is quite the light show. Any fool can, say, jump from a Lockheed C-5. To be inside a Humvee, however, as it drops out of a flaming C-5 whose rear end has been sheared off, and to have your chute deposit you on the lip of a hydroelectric dam, gives you so much more to talk about at parties. As Sarah, Dani, and Grace join forces to trounce their sticky foe, you realize that this is what used to be known as a woman’s picture, propelled by female sacrifice and pluck, and that Mackenzie Davis—tough but not invincible, and wise to her own frailties—is at the core of the propulsion. Meanwhile, for anyone still clinging doggedly to the primacy of the male warrior, the most pressing question is “Will it be curtains for Carl?” Wait and see.

Going to the movies on a date, especially a first date, is a risky business, and many a tender romance must have foundered, in the late nineteen-seventies, during showings of “I Spit on Your Grave.” Never before, though, have I seen anything as openly destructive as “Marriage Story,” the new film from Noah Baumbach , which ought to come with a warning from the M.P.A.A.: “Contains scenes that may wreck your relationship.”

Charlie ( Adam Driver ), a theatre director, lives in New York with his wife, Nicole ( Scarlett Johansson ), an actress, and their eight-year-old son, Henry (Azhy Robertson). We start with two declarations of love. Nicole tells us what she loves about her husband, and he returns the compliment. Each praises the other’s warmth as a parent, plus a variety of respective quirks—Charlie’s tidiness, or Nicole’s knack for opening jars. Notice, by the way, that both parties are described as “competitive.” For a second, we glimpse what lurks ahead.

Baumbach is toying with us. Those declarations, it transpires, are part of a mediation session, which goes badly; the marriage is melting. Nicole flies to Los Angeles to film a pilot for a TV show, taking Henry with her. They stay with Nicole’s exuberant mother (Julie Hagerty). Also around is Nicole’s sister, Cassie (Merritt Wever), who pulls off the funniest and most flustered sequence in the movie—serving Charlie with divorce papers when he arrives. Not funny at all, for him.

That blend of tones, with near-farce and emotional brutality blitzed together, is pure Baumbach, and he dishes it up for two hours straight. Not that his comedy is black. Rather, the damage to hearts and minds is somehow inflicted with a terrible buoyancy of spirit, and at an unbearable cost—literally so in the case of Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), the top-rate lawyer who represents Nicole in the split. “Sorry I look so schleppy,” she says, sashaying across her office in lofty scarlet heels, curling up beside Nicole, and offering tea and cookies (“I’ll send you home with some”). Dern is in devilish form, right down to the little moue of sympathy that she gives when Nicole says, “I don’t want any money or anything.” Yeah, sure.

In the opposite corner is Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta), a bruiser in a suit the color of rain clouds, whose basic retainer is twenty-five thousand dollars. Initially, Charlie goes for the cheaper option, employing Bert Spitz (Alan Alda), who operates out of a crummy joint with a microwave and a cat, and who seems, at least, to register the vandalizing of human dignity on which his trade relies. When the fight gets dirty, however, Bert isn’t up to scratch. “I needed my own asshole,” Charlie says, switching his allegiance to Jay.

Something should be pointed out here, something that you hardly realize as you revel in the expertise of “Marriage Story,” and in the gutsy panache of the performers. It may be something of which the movie is itself unconscious, so steeped is its creator in the world that he describes. This is a frighteningly first-world piece of work. Viewers in countries whose litigious instincts are less barbaric may watch it in amazement, as if it were science fiction. We laugh at Jay’s astronomical fee, but the real joke is that Charlie pays it—that he can afford to pay it—when it comes to the crunch. How about the vast majority of husbands and wives, especially wives, who cannot abide the misery of their union but lack the funds to either solve or dissolve it? The crunch will slay them. In court, it’s true, a judge refers in passing to people with fewer resources than Charlie and Nicole; but one line barely leaves a dent.

Now and then, Baumbach tips his hat to Bergman. “Scenes from a Marriage” is the headline on a magazine article about Charlie and Nicole, and she even plays Electra onstage, as Liv Ullmann’s character does in “ Persona ” (1966). To be honest, though, we are leagues away from Bergman, and “Marriage Story” belongs more to the long and hissy saga of antagonism between Los Angeles and New York. Nicole’s Off Broadway endeavors are dismissed in California as “downtown shit,” and Charlie protests, with ardor, that “we’re a New York family, that’s just a fact.” Hence the devastating shot of him alone on Halloween in L.A., dressed as the Invisible Man, with a bandaged head, and gazing forlornly at the TV. Late-capitalist anomie in a nutshell.

And yet, to be fair, both players are given their say, and their clamorous voice, in equal measure. Johansson unfurls a long and demanding soliloquy, persuading us that Nicole’s role in Charlie’s existence had dwindled to “feeding his aliveness.” Driver, inflating his lungs, responds with a glowing rendition of “Being Alive,” from Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” which sends you reeling and should—but does not—bring the movie to a close. So, which half of the couple is in the right? Neither of them. And both. And who is more alive? It’s a tie. ♦

An earlier version of this piece misstated dialogue said to the Nicole character.

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‘Marriage Story’ review: A great movie you may never want to see again

Noah Baumbach’s remarkably scripted and spectacularly acted “Marriage Story” might just as well have been called “End of a Marriage Story.” It might also be a great movie I never want to see again, though it is too early to tell: Its nuclear-family fallout has not quite settled.

“Marriage Story” makes observations that are probably priceless in a world where divorce has become so common that it is quite a bit like death: It happens every day. It goes virtually unnoticed by the people who are not directly affected. It lays waste to the ones who are.

Noah Baumbach’s remarkably scripted new film might just as well have been called “End of a Marriage Story.”

With a score by Randy Newman and supporting cast that includes Wallace Shawn, Brooke Bloom, Alan Alda and Julie Hagerty, the film also includes a lot of what might be called unbecoming conduct. (“The system rewards bad behavior,” says the shark-like lawyer Nora Fanshaw, played by force-of-nature Laura Dern.) It also stars movie man of the moment Adam Driver , along with Scarlett Johansson. He is a director named Charlie, she is an actress named Nicole, and both are parents to Henry (Azhy Robertson), who is, appropriately, uncharming: A child whose parents are splitting up should not have to be Justin Henry in “Kramer vs. Kramer” (a film with obvious parallels) to earn our sympathy.

Few of the characters go morally unscathed in what is a sometimes harrowing trip to family court. One who does is Bert (played by Alda), the slightly doddering attorney whom Charlie first hires. He is given the film’s best line: “Criminal lawyers see bad people at their best; divorce lawyers see good people at their worst.” Among the points that Baumbach is making—especially by having performers play performers—is that life is an act, and the poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage often does so shoehorned into unfamiliar and even hostile parts.

Few of the characters go morally unscathed in what is a sometimes harrowing trip to family court.

Nicole, for instance, has decided that being a wife to Charlie has finally meant sacrificing too much of herself. Charlie, though temperamentally inclined to a degree of self-doubt, thought he was doing O.K. Both are equally wrong. They resist falling into the pit of recriminations and legalistic dirty pool as long as they can. But they have attorneys, so they are lost.

Charlie eventually ends up with Jay, a more or less stereotypical courtroom carnivore played by a very persuasive Ray Liotta. Nicole’s lawyer, Nora, who is a stand-in for the devil, resorts to socio-religious arguments in getting Nicole to embrace her more ruthless instincts and present herself to the court as squeaky clean and righteously maternal. After all, Nora says, the standard by which women are judged within “our Judeo-Christian whatever” is based on the Virgin Mary. “She’s a virgin who gives birth,” sputters Nora, who, prolonging the metaphor, says, “God is the father and God doesn’t show up.” Meaning that men get away with everything.

The way viewers read “Marriage Story” may well come down to what sex they are. 

Charlie does not seem able to get away with anything. He is no angel, but he wins our sympathy. At least I think he does. The way viewers read “Marriage Story” may well come down to what sex they are and what their romantic-marital-legal experience has been. Both Driver and Johansson give epic performances. She has what felt like an uninterrupted, 10-or-so-minute scene at the film’s beginning during which Nicole explains her plight. It feels, to some degree, like an improvisation at the Actors Studio, but that is the point. She is an actress who commits herself to a role, and the role she has now chosen is divorcée. Charlie, given an emotionally naked portrayal by Driver, is less able to hide, though both should, occasionally. There is a scene toward the end of the film in which Charlie and Nicole have an understandable but nevertheless embarrassing meltdown that will have audiences feeling like intruders. “Whew,” I said to myself. “This is a movie, isn’t it?”

Baumbach’s own divorce from the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh may have inspired this film, and this is only worth mentioning because “Marriage Story” so profoundly feels sprung from someone’s real-life experience. At the same time, we are keenly aware that people are acting—and always are. The double-montage introduction, which serves as a flashback to the blissful years of being “Charlie and Nicole,” partners in both work and life, is pure Woody Allen, with idealized New York people tossing about bon mots and only doing significant work, when they do work, their comings and going executed with perfect timing. The whole thing smacks of one of those New York Times Style features—one of which is actually framed on a wall, about Charlie and Nicole, headlined “Scenes from a Marriage.”

The Bergman film of the same name was a big influence on Allen, and Allen is an influence on Baumbach. “Marriage Story” might have been the nightmare sequel to “Annie Hall,” if Annie and Alvy Singer weren’t old enough now to be Charlie and Nicole’s grandparents (and had actually gotten married). At the risk of prolonging the literary allusion above, “Marriage Story” is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing short of a reappraisal of marriage and divorce and the casualness with which both are entered into. It also suggests, without saying so, that when one applies for a marriage license there ought to be a test.

John Anderson is a television critic for The Wall Street Journal and a contributor to The New York Times.

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‘marriage story’: film review | venice 2019.

Noah Baumbach's latest stars Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver as a couple embroiled in an increasingly bitter divorce.

By Jon Frosch

Senior Editor, Reviews

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Marriage Story   begins with a fake-out. Via voiceover, spouses Charlie ( Adam Driver ) and Nicole ( Scarlett Johansson ) enumerate the things, big and small, that they adore about each other: she’s an unparalleled listener, an expert gift giver, an “infectious” dancer; he’s a natural with their young son, a surprisingly great dresser, cries at movies. Glimpses of their shabby-chic domestic contentment are shown as a bittersweet Randy Newman score swells. It’s all warmly romantic in a grounded, adult way.

Alas, those lists aren’t Valentine’s Day cards Charlie and Nicole have written for one another, or an intimacy exercise meant to draw them closer. They’re something a mediator has asked the pair to cobble together to kick off their separation in good faith. On the surface, this is indeed not a tale of love, but of mounting mutual hostility — though as Noah Baumbach ’s wounding, masterly new film argues, the line between those sentiments can be agonizingly blurry.

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Release date: Nov 06, 2019

Viewers who dug the relative mellowness of Baumbach’s last effort, 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) , should brace themselves: Like Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage — an inevitable influence — this is a tough piece of work, steeped in pain that feels wincingly immediate (it’s based on Baumbach’s own divorce from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh) and unsparing in its willingness to observe, at sometimes startling emotional proximity, good people at their worst.

It’s also funny and, when you least expect it (and most need it), almost unbearably tender, thanks in large part to the sensational leads, who deliver the deepest, most alive and attuned performances of their careers. Marriage Story puts you through the wringer, but leaves you exhilarated at having witnessed a filmmaker and his actors surpass themselves.

Baumbach’s movies tend to elicit disapproving murmurs about navel-gazing and score-settling, and this will be no exception. It’s sturdy enough to withstand the criticism; few current American writer-directors are plumbing their personal histories as profoundly.

The juxtaposition of the film’s moony opening montage with the tense mediation scene that follows generates suspense: What went wrong between Charlie and Nicole? But Marriage Story finds Baumbach in an expectation-confounding mood; rather than a wistful postmortem of a failed romance à la Annie Hall , the movie offers a chronicle of conflictedness, and of how a relationship changes — flails, explodes, evolves — over the course of divorce proceedings. Along the way, we grasp the dynamic that led to this particular marital collapse, but that is neither Baumbach’s point nor his purpose.

When we meet them, Charlie is a Brooklyn theater director and Nicole, having turned down a few lucrative offers in Hollywood, his company’s leading lady. After they split up, Nicole takes their 8-year-old son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), and moves back to her native Los Angeles to shoot a TV pilot. She spends time with her daffy mother (Julie Hagerty), a former actress herself, and sister (the scene-stealing Merritt Wever). A new life starts to take form.

The challenge is figuring out where Charlie fits into it. Deciding to make their separation official, Nicole consults high-powered divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw (played to savage perfection by Laura Dern ). Staying friends with her ex-husband is the priority, Nicole insists. “We’ll do it as gently as possible,” Nora reassures her. Uh-huh.

Nicole tells Nora her side of the story, recounting how her identity — her ideas, personality and ambitions — gradually became secondary to, and then swallowed by, Charlie’s. The substance of the monologue is familiar: A woman finds herself shrinking in the shadow of her husband’s ego and needs. But Baumbach shoots it in a few long takes, the camera slowly closing in on Nicole, and the whirlpool of feelings Johansson conjures — the nostalgia, the churning vulnerability, the currents of shame and self-loathing — is astonishing.

Nicole’s desire to spend more time in L.A., we learn, was a major point of contention during the marriage, and remains so during the divorce. Though his work is still in New York, Charlie — after meeting with two drastically different lawyers ( Alan Alda and Ray Liotta , both in fine, mischievous form) — establishes part-time residency near Nicole in order to negotiate shared custody of Henry. A new normal is established, with pickups and drop-offs, exorbitant legal fees and awkward conversations.

The exes still care about each other, as is illustrated by two moments of gentle heartbreak — one in which Nicole trims Charlie’s hair, another in which she orders lunch for him at a settlement conference. Among the movie’s most piercing insights is that divorce, even when necessary, isn’t always intuitive; sometimes it’s an act of self-abnegation, contrary to what the heart wants and requiring an almost cruel degree of discipline.

It can also snowball, taking on proportions of unpleasantness that dwarf or obscure the reasons it was pursued in the first place. Other American films about divorce (a mini-canon that includes Kramer vs. Kramer , Shoot the Moon and, yes, The War of the Roses ) have portrayed this phenomenon — the legal process driving and shaping the couple’s feelings rather than vice versa — but none with the force and clarity of this one.

With the attorneys nudging them toward more aggressive stances, Charlie and Nicole face off in an argument of soul-shaking vitriol, their grievances surging forth like scorching lava. As the problems of their marriage are laid bare (his reflexive selfishness and infidelity, her tendency to cast herself as a victim), the scene captures more harrowingly than any I can remember how easily love can curdle into hate — the terrifying closeness of the two.

This all makes Marriage Story sound grimmer than it is. Baumbach has always been a master of high-toned cringe comedy, and there are laughs that leaven the mood here. A sequence in which Nicole’s mom and sister help her serve Charlie divorce papers is executed with giddy screwball snap. And when a poker-faced social worker (Martha Kelly) pays a visit to Charlie and Henry, the result is a stealth comic set piece that, in its unnerving way, is even more of a high-wire act than the swerve into country-house farce in Baumbach’s Mistress America .

Shooting on 35mm, the director — collaborating with DP Robbie Ryan — employs a spry, supple visual style, interspersing close-ups that capture subtle shifts in his actors’ faces with striking wider angles that draw attention to the physical distance between Charlie and Nicole, as well as their movements and body language around each other. The framing, staging and control over the flow of the action are confident, at times dazzling, though free of gratuitous flash or fuss. Objects, gestures and moments — a gate pulled shut, a shoelace being tied, an unexpected burst into song — are imbued, but never weighed down, with meaning. This is the work of a filmmaker in full command of his powers.

If there’s been a limitation in Baumbach’s movies, it’s a kind of narrowness in the conception of certain characters. Nicole Kidman’s monstrous mom in Margot at the Wedding and Driver’s insufferable hipster-fraud in While We’re Young , for example, contributed to a sense that those stories were rigged; there was no room to figure out what to make of these people, because Baumbach had already done it for us. Charlie and Nicole, on the other hand, are thrillingly complicated, written with a generous feel for the chaos and contradiction of human emotions.

Johansson can be a self-conscious performer, too busy chewing the inside of her mouth and gazing sultrily to really burrow into a role. Not so here. The actress makes you feel the clashing impulses and instincts — anger and longing, defiance and guilt, boldness and trepidation — in every step of Nicole’s transition into life without Charlie.

Driver has an even trickier task. Charlie isn’t an ostentatious narcissist like the patriarchs played by Jeff Daniels and Dustin Hoffman in Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale and The Meyerowitz Stories , respectively. He’s affable, affectionate and self-aware . But Charlie has had an eclipsing effect on the woman he loves, and Driver delivers a brilliantly inhabited and shaded portrait of a man who’s forced to reckon with that reality.

Some will say  Marriage Story favors Charlie. He’s the filmmaker’s surrogate, and the second half, in particular, centers on his perspective and experience. But Baumbach is at once hard on, and forgiving of, the two characters, and audience sympathies will likely seesaw. It’s a testament to the film that by the time it reaches its delicate knockout of a conclusion, despite all Charlie and Nicole have said and done, the maddening mess they’ve made of things, we’ve come to love them both.

Production companies: Heyday Films, Netflix Distributor: Netflix Writer-director: Noah Baumbach Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, Alan Alda, Julie Hagerty, Merritt Wever, Azhy Robertson Producers: Noah Baumbach, David Heyman Executive producer: Craig Shilowich Cinematography: Robbie Ryan Music: Randy Newman Editor: Jennifer Lame Production design: Jade Healy Costume design: Mark Bridges Casting: Douglas Aibel, Francine Maisler Venue: Venice International Film Festival (Competition)

136 minutes

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‘Marriage Story’ review: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver are riveting as a marital cyclone hits

Movie review.

Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” pulls us inside the cyclone of a disintegrating marriage, letting us see the shrapnel flying and the devastated landscape left behind. New York theater couple Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), an actress, and Charlie (Adam Driver), a director, have been together about a decade, and have an 8-year-old son, Henry (Azhy Robertson). We meet the couple, in an opening scene in a therapist’s office, as they are listing things they love about each other. Nicole, Charlie says, gives great presents. Charlie, Nicole says, is “brilliant at creating family from whoever’s around.”

It’s a quiet beginning for a movie that quickly gets much harsher, but the affection expressed in those lists keeps popping up, in unexpected places: an endearment that slips out — “honey” — in the middle of a fight, like something left behind on the floor in an otherwise cleared-out room. “Marriage Story” takes us through a vast range of emotions, from wall-punching, voices-raised anger to quiet reflection, as two people try to understand why they don’t love each other anymore.

And, like a new-generation “Kramer vs. Kramer,” they battle for custody of Henry; complicated by the fact that Nicole has moved back to her native Los Angeles to be near her family, while Charlie has stayed in New York for his work. Each retains a lawyer: Nicole hires Nora (Laura Dern, wonderful as always), a sleekly smiling divorce attorney who clearly enjoys the process of extracting all she can get; Charlie first employs Bert (Alan Alda), a kindly old-school fellow who counsels “remember, the win is what’s best for Henry,” but switches to the more barracuda-like Jay (Ray Liotta).

With up-close cinematography and long, patient scenes in which characters pour out their hearts, “Marriage Story” feels startlingly intimate; we’re right there in this marriage, witnessing its dying embers. Baumbach makes it tough for us to take sides; both Nicole and Charlie are flawed characters who make missteps — they’re competitive, and they both want to win — but they adore their son and want to do right by him. “I want to stay friends,” says Nicole hesitantly, and she means it, but friendship on a battlefield is hard to sustain.

It’s a movie full of moments and details that resonate: an exquisitely awkward Halloween-night sequence, as Charlie desperately tries to show Henry some fun on a lonely second round of trick-or-treating; the quiet of the relentlessly beige apartment Charlie rents in Los Angeles, in the hopes of getting custody; the warmth of Nicole’s extended family, representing another loss for Charlie; the hurt that hangs in the air between these two, like a fog that won’t lift. Johansson and Driver are remarkably, heartbreakingly good in every scene; showing their characters’ journeys to an unflinching camera, letting the gap between them get wider yet unable, for their son’s sake, to completely walk away. It’s a drama playing out on two larger-than-life faces; a family torn apart, and yet enduring.

★★★★ “ Marriage Story ,” with Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, Julie Hagerty, Merritt Wever, Azhy Robertson. Written and directed by Noah Baumbach. 137 minutes. Rated R for language throughout and sexual references. Opens Nov. 27 at Crest Cinema Center; begins streaming on Netflix Dec. 6.

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‘Marriage Story’ Review: Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson Power Emotional Noah Baumbach Drama

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“ Marriage Story ” brings a lot of baggage to the table: It’s a divorce saga about a wealthy showbiz couple that burrows into the emotional turmoil of their split, and the plight of whiny, privileged white people is not exactly in vogue. But the power of “Marriage Story” stems from the way it transcends the simplicity of its premise, with writer-director Noah Baumbach matching the material for his most personal movie with filmmaking ambition to spare, and a pair of devastating performances from Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson that rank as their very best. It starts from a familiar place, then sneaks into transcendence.

The opener packs a wallop. Acclaimed New York playwright Charlie (Driver) and his longtime actress muse Nicole (Johansson) have already decided to part ways, leaving the future custody of their child in doubt. A counselor assigned to mediate the separation asks the pair to jot down each other’s positive attributes, yielding an operatic sequence of dueling voiceovers that careens from Charlie’s affections for Nicole to Nicole’s affections for Charlie before crescendoing in the midst of their current frustrations. It’s an audacious start that epitomizes the contradictory experiences at the center of the movie, a touching evocation of romance with a cynical aftertaste, and Baumbach’s only getting started.

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The irony of “Marriage Story” is that the story has more to do with the particulars of the divorce process — the way the intricate legalities unfold in bland meeting rooms and harsh courtroom exchanges at odds with the fragile circumstances. Over the course of 136 absorbing minutes, as the movie navigates Charlie and Nicole’s clashing perspectives, Baumbach doesn’t attempt to reconstruct the path toward divorce so much as the complex psychological turmoil it instigates for his protagonists.

“Marriage Story” starts with Nicole’s perspective, and the split seems like a no-brainer: Living in Los Angeles as she prepares for a new television show, she has drifted apart from Charlie as he prepares to stage a new project in New York. Nicole was once the shining star of Charlie’s New York-based theater company, but has since moved in her own direction, and he remains oblivious to her needs. At the insistence of a colleague, she connects with the high-powered attorney Nora (a mesmerizing Laura Dern, wearing a smile that could kill). Nora’s the sort of no-nonsense Hollywood veteran whose ability to assess Nicole’s situation requires her to oscillate from benevolent therapist to ruthless interrogator. Nicole’s first session is marked by a freewheeling monologue that stretches on for several minutes, as the actress chronicles the evolution of her attraction to Charlie and its eventual dissolution; there’s enough detail to fill an entire movie of its own, and by the end of the scene, you feel like you’ve seen it without a single flashback.

A jittery comic suspense operates under the surface of many darker moments, from the delivery of divorce papers to an awkward encounter with child protective services. Whereas Nicole’s struggles are tinged with mounting sense of empowerment, Charlie stumbles through a Kafkaesque maze of legalese and the various outsized characters who live in its convoluted pathways. Not since David Fincher’s “Zodiac” has a movie placed such absorbing emphasis on the jigsaw puzzle of searching for solutions that may never fully resolve themselves.

When Charlie pays his own visit to the attorney’s office, he finds himself cowering under the barking demands of another hotshot lawyer to the stars (Ray Liotta, who seems to have stumbled into the frame from “Goodfellas”); his harsh demands are comically undercut by the cheaper option Charlie seeks for a second opinion (Alan Alda), a frumpy negotiator who basically tells Charlie he may as well give up. Alda’s real-life Parkinson’s tremors fuel what may be his saddest performance, and provide a shrewd allegory for the withering sense of defeat that bubbles up in Charlie’s consciousness as he comes to terms with the end of his marriage.

The specter of “Kramer vs. Kramer” casts a mighty shadow on these proceedings, but “Marriage Story” has an intimacy all to its own, and develops a unique tone that even Baumbach fans may not fully recognize at first. Nearly 15 years ago, with “The Squid and the Whale,” Baumbach explored the experience of divorce through the lens of teen angst; with “Marriage Story,” the gaze is more distinctly adult (and funneled to some extent through the end of his own marriage to Jennifer Jason Leigh).   At the same time, the earnest celebration of family that emerged in his “The Meyerowitz Stories” finds a steadier foundation here, as Charlie and Nicole grapple with their dueling priorities and what they mean for their child’s future.

That child is played with remarkable curiosity and innocence by Ashy Robertson, but ultimately becomes more of a prop who animates the couple’s argument that lies at the movie’s center: Charlie insists that the family reside in New York, even though the couple moved to Los Angeles for a prolonged period of time for Nicole’s work, and their child attends school there. Small details about their domestic life resurface as evidence in unnerving courtroom confrontations, leading the couple to wonder if they’re better off just talking things through.

But as they do, the repression of the legal procedure caves into raw explosions of rage. When Charlie finally loses his cool, Driver unleashes a kind of brutal intensity that might even jangle Kylo Ren’s nerves. At the same time, he’s able to channel the character’s passive-aggression into gentler tones. His rendition of “Being Alive” from “Company” at a dinner party is a mesmerizing achievement all by itself. Johansson, meanwhile, has become such a familiar onscreen presence after more than two decades that her talent is often hiding in plain sight. Her ability to carry some of the movie’s more frustrating showdowns illustrate her capacity to look stern and fragile at once.

While Baumbach always excels at crafting tense exchanges between prickly characters unable to come to grips with their true feelings, “Marriage Story” reflects a new level of narrative sophistication. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan (“The Favourite”) captures some of the movie’s most absorbing moments in candid closeups while also knowing when to pull back, including one unexpectedly freaky sequence involving a kitchen knife. Meanwhile, Randy Newman’s inquisitive score highlights some of the bigger moments — as if the actor and director at the center of the story are imagining their dramas in true movie language, and can hear the music on the soundtrack along with us.

To that end, “Marriage Story” functions on a commentary on the type of genre it inhabits: that well-trod terrain of urban sophisticates careening through romantic dissatisfaction as they confront a new phase of life. Baumbach, however, finds a fresh angle by illustrating what it means to live inside that cycle rather than regarding it from afar. (“She makes me feel comfortable about even embarrassing things,” Charlie says when expressing his appreciation for Nicole, and the movie seems to do the same thing for its audience, easing us into their turmoil.) “Marriage Story” is less about divorce than it is about surviving it — a powerful reminder that every breakup story looks familiar until it happens to you, and then the truth hurts.

“Marriage Story” premiered at the 2019 Venice Film Festival and is screening at other fall festivals. It is available on Netflix and in theaters this fall.

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Review: A masterful 'Marriage Story' emotionally devastates its characters (and you)

Like the “Saving Private Ryan” of divorce dramedies, “Marriage Story” puts its audience into the thick of all the complicated feelings, bitter domestic rumbles and lawyer fees that come with such a dissolution, with enough hopeful and hilarious moments to balance out the emotional devastation.

Writer/director Noah Baumbach’s spectacular effort (★★★★ out of four ; rated R; streaming on Netflix now) is a highlight reel for everyone involved: career-defining work from Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, astounding supporting turns courtesy of Laura Dern and Alan Alda, and a masterclass from Baumbach.

Over a brilliantly paced and thoughtful two and a quarter hours, the filmmaker lets his two main characters explain what they love about each other before chronicling how it all falls apart and everybody must rise anew.

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Charlie (Driver) is an up-and-coming New York stage director and Nicole (Johansson) is an actress in his company with screen dreams, yet there’s as much untold resentment as artistry in their marriage. Nicole wants a divorce and she decides to head back home to California with their young son Henry (Azhy Robertson) as the couple works things out. The move leaves Charlie reeling, as he juggles directing his latest play with cross-country jaunts to find the right divorce attorney and attempt to keep some semblance of a relationship with his son.

While it’s easy to take Charlie’s side early in the film, since the viewer spends more time with him, Baumbach artfully reveals the internal lives of each of his leads – their wants, their needs, their idiosyncrasies – so that the viewer gets to know both Charlie and Nicole equally.

Which means it’s all the more disconcerting when the divorce gets petty and ugly . It comes to a ferocious head in one shattering scene that begins with them just wanting to talk in Charlie’s LA apartment and, before you know what’s happening, crescendoes into a heartbreaking melee of unbridled venom and anger. It’s a memorable piece of tear-jerking annihilation that leaves its characters – and the viewer – absolutely exhausted.

There are obvious shades of “Kramer vs. Kramer,” the 1979 best picture winner that mined similar familial breakage, and it's a running theme in Baumbach's art-house filmography, from 2005's semi-autobiographical divorce tale "The Squid and the Whale" to the dysfunctional clans of 2007's "Margot at the Wedding" and 2017's "The Meyerowitz Stories." 

But Baumbach keeps “Marriage Story,” easily his best outing, fresh and moving by weaving in bits of screwball humor, romantic comedy and even musical stylings to complement the domestic drama. Nicole and Charlie both break into song separately (but naturally), and each instance acts as a welcome catharsis within their tumultuous character arcs.

Driver is impressive as usual but shows more warmth here as an everyman with foibles who is willing to go to desperate lengths to fight for his child and career. And Johansson has simply never been better, giving a knockout performance as a woman equally intent on moving on, with her own life goals in mind.

Divorce affects a wide radius of folks, not just the principals, and Baumbach emphasizes that with his supporting cast. Dern is an enjoyable force of nature as Nora, a bulldog of a lawyer who shows different sides to different people – in the middle of a heated meeting, she makes sure everybody, friend and foe, gets their lunch orders. Alda is also a delight as Bert, Charlie's representation who takes a more empathetic approach to legal issues.

"Marriage Story" delivers powerful performances from its actors yet is also quite adept at showing the mundane and ordinary slices of life during a moving and artful journey that'll leave you a teary, satisfied mess.

Whose Side Is ‘Marriage Story’ On?

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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Do we choose sides when we watch “ Marriage Story ,” Noah Baumbach ’s brilliant and wrenching drama of divorce? The question, on the face of it, sounds facile in a dozen ways the movie isn’t. Rarely are there winners in divorce, and there are two sides to every breakup. “Marriage Story” is a movie that reflects that reality. It’s a dazzlingly layered and empathetic tale that delves deep into the lives of both Charlie ( Adam Driver ) and Nicole ( Scarlett Johansson ), a couple who are splitting up despite the fact that they’ve never stopped loving each other. They each have their reasons, their desires and arguments and defenses. It might seem to violate the essence of a movie like this one to declare that either one of them is “right.”

Yet I’d suggest it’s woven into the dramatic fabric of “Marriage Story” that as we watch this couple, looking on as their descent into the divorce-industrial complex plays out logistically and spiritually, we ask ourselves, at almost every turn: Who is making the mistake here? Who, if either of them, has committed the big wrong? The way we ask — and answer — that question is the driving spark of the film’s drama. Since the movie is unabashed in presenting the many ways that Charlie and Nicole are good together, we have our eye on the moral scale of every decision that led to their falling apart.

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From the moment I saw and reviewed “Marriage Story” at the Venice Film Festival in August, I was always planning to circle back to this issue. But now that the film has been released (if you can call the ghostly, half-hearted distribution Netflix is giving it a release), that question had bled into a new dynamic: the calling of the movie on the carpet for not being enlightened or woke enough. “Marriage Story” is being assailed, by some, as a film about elite showbiz people (who are therefore not representative of a “typical” divorcing couple). And since Baumbach, in making the film, drew on the dissolution of his own marriage to the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, some have seized upon that as an example of a real-world, off-screen situation that stacks the deck of the film’s sexual politics — i.e., Baumbach gets to replay his divorce and, this time, control the narrative. The movie, to put it bluntly, is being dumped on for being about the travails of upper-middle-class white people, with a privileged white man at the helm.

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That debate isn’t the subject of this column, yet it can’t help but figure in, since the question of whose side “Marriage Story” is on is a loaded one in the context of woke takedown culture. Is the movie, beneath the ripple of its complexities, an apologia for bad male behavior? If it were, it certainly wouldn’t be a good movie. Yet the head-spinning strategic gambit of “Marriage Story” is that the film, to a large degree, is angled toward a male point-of-view, only one that turns out to be supremely blinkered and problematic. In the eyes of some people, that automatically makes the movie suspect. But if you truly look at what’s happening on screen, “Marriage Story” is nothing less than the saga of an awakening.

The film divides its sympathies between both characters, but there’s no question that the narrative is dominated by Charlie, the downtown New York theater director who is blindsided by the decision of Nicole, a former indie It Girl actress, to take their son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), to Los Angeles as she shoots the pilot episode of a new TV series. She wants to reignite her career — and why shouldn’t she? And if the series gets picked up? (Which it does.) She’ll want to relocate to L.A., which is her hometown, and where she yearned to move anyway. Charlie, his career and spirit implanted in the concrete soul of New York, never wanted any part of that move. He thinks that he, Nicole, and Henry, in their cozy pad in Brooklyn, are a “New York family.” And that, indeed, is what they’ve been. But mostly because that’s what Charlie wanted them to be.

In a provocative essay on the op-ed page of The New York Times , Jourdain Searles argues that “Marriage Story” is less “progressive” in its drama than “ Kramer vs. Kramer ,” made 40 years ago, because that film depicted Dustin Hoffman’s Ted Kramer as growing into the role of nurturer, whereas Adam Driver’s Charlie, stuck in the trenches of divorce hell, never takes on that role in such a tender, hands-on way. But I’d argue it’s implicit in “Marriage Story” that the revolution in masculine roles represented by “Kramer vs. Kramer” is one that Charlie has already emerged from. He’s an engaged and caring dad; he knows how to look after his son and be more than the breadwinner (the journey that Ted Kramer took at the start of “Kramer”). “Marriage Story” jumps off from a dilemma that sounds more superficial: What’s a couple to do when each partner wants to live in a different place? Who’s going to win that argument? And what does the outcome mean?

Almost any argument, within a marriage, can be about something larger than that argument. “Marriage Story” makes the audience feel blindsided, too, as we can’t help, at first, but sympathize with Charlie. Yet the world that’s churning inside Nicole comes rushing into the drama during the scene where she first consults Laura Dern’s divorce lawyer to the stars. In a monologue that becomes an extraordinarily spontaneous and expressive piece of acting, Scarlett Johansson articulates the reasons — the stirrings of Nicole’s heart, the workings of her mind, the place they interlock — for why the East Coast-vs.-West Coast conflict in her marriage embodied something so much bigger. It wasn’t just a power struggle about where they were going to live. It was about the primal issue of whether Charlie, wrapped up in his cushy bohemian life, actually heard her.

He didn’t. He wouldn’t . And that’s the wound, the sin, the problem. That’s why they’re getting divorced.

In “Kramer vs. Kramer,” Ted Kramer has to learn, for the first time, how to care for a child on a daily basis, and that’s a mountain for him to climb. But in “Marriage Story,” what Charlie is fighting for is the basic right to be with his child. (The kid can’t live in two places at once.) And that, in its way, is a question that transcends privilege. When I see reports about celebrity divorces in the tabloids, it always strikes me that issues of child custody are the supreme leveler. It doesn’t matter whether you’re wealthy, powerful, or the most beloved star on the planet: If so, the trauma of divorce may be cushioned (you won’t have to deal with the romantic-shopping-mall bummer of online dating), but when you’re compromised in how much access you have to your kids, you are, on some level, in the same position as the divorced nobody in Akron.

“Marriage Story” is about the traumatic sting of Charlie and Nicole’s separation, but more than that it’s about Charlie’s dawning realization that divorce may take Henry away from him. The film, for a long time, puts us “on Charlie’s side,” so that when he hires a world-weary schlub of a divorce lawyer (Alan Alda) and then a cynical shark of a divorce lawyer (Ray Liotta), we instinctively want him to “win.” But that’s only because the film has lodged us in a point-of-view that is demonstrated, over time, to be fundamentally self-centered. The marriage is beyond repair, but as the film colors in that marriage we see that it wasn’t always beyond repair. If Charlie had boxed his mind open in a different way, maybe he’d now be in a different place.

So whose side is “Marriage Story” on? You could say that the movie is a sleight-of-hand trick. It shows us more of Charlie’s side. In the end, though, it is firmly on Nicole’s side. Charlie doesn’t know what hit him, and that makes him a touchingly vulnerable and desperate figure. What he wants from the divorce-industrial complex is for the court in Los Angeles to side with the place he was at in his marriage: that it was the right thing for him to do to hold his “New York family” together. Yet the film embeds us in that outlook only to portray it as the one Charlie has to wake up from. If he’d woken up before, he might still be married. He thought he was the sun, the center of the solar system. But now he’s starting his life as just another planet. At least he’s finally in orbit.

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Marriage Story Review: A Broken Relationship But Two Of The Year's Best Performances

Half of all American marriages end in divorce. That’s not a sweeping generalization to catch your attention. Statically, 50% of the couples who get married in the United States in 2019 will also go through a divorce. Separations are way more common than you realize or expect. Yet Hollywood prefers to focus on the happier first half of most relationships. The “cute meet.” The courtship. Rom-coms are fueled by the notion of falling IN love, and rarely do we stop and linger on the couples that fall OUT of love.

Marriage Story does that, and does that incredibly well. It is Kramer vs. Kramer , made for a generation who hasn’t seen Kramer vs. Kramer . Side note: See Kramer vs. Kramer . It’s a devastating portrayal of the hardships of parenting while also trying to make a failed relationship work, and Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is every bit that movie’s equal, which is the highest compliment I can pay it.

The leads give Oscar-worthy performances.

Many want to assume that Marriage Story recounts Noah Baumbach’s own personal struggles with his former wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh. And that may be true. The couple married in 2005 but divorced in 2013, and you can see potential similarities between Baumbach and Leigh in the characters played in screen by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson .

And damn, are those two Oscar-worthy. Driver’s Charlie Barber is a New York playwright who has enjoyed success, though his career has overshadowed the acting aspirations of his wife and partner, Nicole (Johansson). Initially, Nicole was a shining star in Charlie’s theatrical company. But she wants more, and she recently has come to the realization that her life has been peppered by sacrifices she made so that Charlie can thrive. And she’s ready to move on and make her own life work… even if that means dividing up the family they have created.

Driver and Johansson are phenomenal. They rise to the challenge of the big, emotionally draining scenes that are required in a divorce drama like this. But they also win the battle in the smaller, intimate scenes that help us believe in Charlie and Nicole as a believable couple. No one is right or wrong in Marriage Story (though you likely will choose a side as both protagonists lay out their sides). But Driver and Johansson thrive in the material by making their characters multi-faceted, human, relatable and sympathetic, during some particularly difficult times.

The supporting cast is loaded with scene-stealers.

I’d watch an entire cut of Marriage Story that was just Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson playing off of each other. They’re just that good together. But Baumbach’s latest also succeeds as one of those rewarding vehicles where every supporting part introduces the familiar face of a beloved character actor who smashes every single scene out of the park, making Marriage Story a better overall movie because of their involvement.

Eventually, Charlie and Nicole’s squabbles have to make their way to the courts, as she has moved their son, Henry, to California while Charlie’s hellbent on staying in Manhattan. And Baumbach arms his leads with brilliant actors portraying their attorneys, each coming at the divorce with competing agendas. Laura Dern has been earning most of the early press for playing Nora Fanshaw, a battle-tested divorce attorney who agrees to handle Nicole’s case – even though Nicole has made it clear that she doesn’t want to make life too difficult for Charlie.

Across the aisle, Charlie learns he must find a California attorney, even though he believed that he and Nicole would just “work it out” on their own, and he doesn’t have the funds to get locked in a long legal battle. He lands in the offices of the sympathetic, subdued Vert Spitz (the tremendous Alan Alda), and though he’s the polar opposite to Dern’s viper, he’s been around more than enough blocks to know exactly where this divorce is heading, and how difficult it’s going to be for everyone before all is said and done.

This is about as raw, emotional and honest as a movie can get.

And that’s the biggest takeaway from Marriage Story : Divorce is incredibly difficult, and unbelievably painful. There’s no simple, easy way to untangle two people whose lives have become intertwined. It’s messy. It’s expensive. It’s life-altering, and usually not in any positive kinds of ways.

But the screenplay for Marriage Story doesn’t shy away, at all, from these difficulties. Instead, it views them from the vantage point of someone who has been through these crippling obstacles, and therefor will either remind some viewers of some of their most difficult times, or serve as a warning for anyone who may have to go through with this in the future.

Yet, Marriage Story is not without hope. It’s not a total wallow in despair. It’s final shot suggests the possibility of normalcy, reminding me so very much of the shot of Dustin Hoffman and Justin Henry making breakfast in their cramped kitchen, not needing to say a word but finally finding balance after what had been a turbulent experience. What Marriage Story might be saying is that there is a light at the end of that tunnel, not matter how dark and suffocating the tunnel may feel while you are journeying through it.

Sean O’Connell is a journalist and CinemaBlend’s Managing Editor. Having been with the site since 2011, Sean interviewed myriad directors, actors and producers, and created ReelBlend, which he proudly cohosts with Jake Hamilton and Kevin McCarthy. And he's the author of RELEASE THE SNYDER CUT, the Spider-Man history book WITH GREAT POWER, and an upcoming book about Bruce Willis.

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TIFF Review: ‘Marriage Story’ is the Best Divorce Movie of This Decade

What’s a marriage? Is it union of two people in love? Or is it a proof to society that two people are in love? Or is it just a contractual relationship recognized by law? Well, the answer might depend on person to person. The truth is when two people are in love and want to spend their lives together, it doesn’t matter what the definition of marriage is. They just want to be together and if marriage happens to be a seal of approval of their love, then so be it. But, ask anyone who is getting separated or has undergone the process of divorce, and they will tell you that marriage is in the end a contract. And not just any contract, but a contract that comes with a lot of additional baggage — most of them emotional. Noah Baumbach’s ‘Marriage Story’ isn’t about marriage per se; it is rather about the emotional and legal repercussions of breaking up of a marriage. I think a more apt title for the film would have been “Separation Story” or even “Divorce Story”, for Baumbach definitely isn’t making any arguments for marriage in the film; he is making arguments against marriage — and for love, if you will.

‘Marriage Story’ revolves around Charlie (Driver), who is a theater director in New York, and Nicole (Johansson), who is an actress. Nicole and Charlie have a son together, Henry (Azhy Robertson), whom they adore. The film starts with Nicole about to leave the family’s home in New York for Los Angeles, where she’ll be filming a TV pilot. She is taking Henry with her, and although the understanding is that the two will return to New York after her work is done, the act of dissolving the marriage is already in progress. Nicole and Charlie want a friendly separation, with minimal impact on Henry. But once Nicole reaches Los Angeles, she connects with a divorce lawyer, Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), a shred lawyer, who convinces her that she deserves much more than what she might have made herself believe. And from then on, the tension between Charlie and Nicole escalates as both try to keep custody of their son. Initially, it seems Nicole is the one who is more aggressive, but soon Charlie too becomes acrimonious and angry. What follows is a series of confrontational scenes, mostly passive-aggressive, but a few real in-your-face kind. One particular scene, which might very well be the scene of the year, stands out in which both Nicole and Charlie blame each other of the nastiest things possible.

Noah Baumbach has always been known to be a master at understanding the dynamics of dysfunctional families. In ‘Marriage Story’, he shows, he also has a great understanding of the complexities of love, marriage and separation. I was particularly amazed at how adroitly he navigates the maze of emotions in the film. You have to understand that the film is not just about those high-pitch moments where Charlie and Nicole are having a shouting match. The film also has these beautiful tender moments, where there isn’t much dialogue. Baumbach’s writing is so powerful that many a times, a glance is enough to communicate thousand words.

Both Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson act their heart out in the film. This is easily their career best performances. To be honest, the film would not work without their tremendous turns as sparring couples. They make every word uttered believable. Laura Dern is also great in a supporting turn that will most likely earn her a lot of accolades, including Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

There’s so much of depth in ‘Marriage Story’ that it is difficult to explain everything in words. There’s heartbreak, there are emotional outbursts, there’s passion, there’s grief, there’s anger, there’s regret. But all said and done, in the end, ‘Marriage Story’ might just be about what it is to be human. We are flawed. We are selfish. We make mistakes. Most of us are ambitious too. So, when two flawed and ambitious people start living under the same roof, there are bound to be differences and arguments. And if you are asking yourself: who between Charlie and Nicole was at fault? The answer is neither. Their only fault was that, just like us, they are humans.

Rating: 4.5/5

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The bizarre true story behind netflix’s ‘tell them you love me’—where is anna stubblefield now.

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Tell Them You Love Me on Netflix.

Netflix’s newest true crime documentary, Tell Them You Love Me, is currently the No. 2 movie on the streaming platform. While watching the film, you might have questions about what happened in real life, including where Anna Stubblefield is now .

Directed by Nick August-Perna, Netflix’s Tell Them You Love Me delves into the controversial relationship between a white, abled professor and a nonverbal Black man with cerebral palsy, which led to a “nation-wide debate over power dynamics, disability, and race” after the man’s said that he couldn’t give consent, according to Netflix’s Tudum .

The documentary centers on whether Johnson, who is nonverbal, could communicate through FC communication and give consent. The court initially answered “no” to the question of consent and Anna Stubblefield was sentenced to two, 12-year terms in 2015. That didn’t mark the end of the strange case — the professor’s initial conviction was overturned, and she was released after two years after pleading to a lesser sentence.

Tell Them You Love Me centers on first-hand testimony from Stubblefield, Johnson’s family members, FC expert Howard Shane, and disabled anthropologist and professor Devva Kasnitz to tell the story of what happened.

How Did Anna Stubblefield and Derrick Johnson Meet?

Derrick Johnson and his brother, John Johnson

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Anna Stubblefield and Derrick Johnson crossed paths in 2009 through his brother, John Johnson. John was a PhD student at Rutgers University and took Stubblefield’s philosophy and disability studies class. After class, he approached the professor to learn more about facilitated communication, a technique Stubblefield was familiar with after watching her mother use it for 20 years.

After speaking with D.J.’s mother, Daisy Johnson, the married ethics professor offered to facilitate D.J. herself. “She was gonna move mountains, and I accepted her at her word,” Daisy says in Tell Them You Love Me.

What Is FC Communication?

FC communication is an assisted typing technique where a facilitator physically supports a person’s hand or arm as they point to letters on a page or keyboard, spelling out words. However, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) describes FC communication as “a discredited technique that should not be used.” The association says that there is “extensive scientific evidence” that “messages are authored by the “facilitator” rather than the person with a disability.”

Stubblefield said that she successfully taught D.J. how to communicate through FC, and with her assistance, he began taking a university class. The professor claimed that Johnson was an intellectual trapped in a body that could not communicate.

But just five years before, a clinical psychologist named Wayne Tillman evaluated D.J. and found that he couldn’t carry out basic, pre-school level tasks. Tillman said that his “comprehension seemed to be quite limited,” “his attention span was very short,” and he “lacks the cognitive capacity to understand and participate in decisions,” according to The New York Times .

Derrick was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus after suffering multiple seizures as an infant. He learned how to walk after attending a day program and participating in his family’s daily routine. In the documentary, John says that while D.J. was “there” and expressed emotions like feeling happy or frustrated, he never had a formal education.

What Happened Between Anna Stubblefield And Derrick Johnson?

Anna Stubblefield

With Stubblefield’s help, Derrick progressed rapidly with FC — although his success only occurred when the professor, and not his mother or brother, was facilitating. D.J. became more interested in his studies; he enrolled in an African American Literature course and attended FC conferences with Stubblefield, who shared statements he had allegedly written.

‘‘The right to communication is the right to hope,’’ one essay said, per The New York Times. ‘‘I am jumping for joy knowing I can talk, but don’t minimize how humiliating it can be to know people jump to the conclusion I am mentally disabled.’’

At the same time, red flags started to emerge. Stubblefield said that Derrick preferred classical music to the gospel station they were listening to in the car. She also said he liked red wine more than beer, wanted to be a vegetarian, and hoped to move out of his mother’s house, according to Time.com . Daisy started to get suspicious, as her “alleged” son’s words sounded “very much of what she [Anna] liked but not what [D.J.] liked.’’

Stubblefield, who was married at the time, claimed that she and D.J. fell in love and she planned to leave her husband for him. She later testified that her feelings for him developed gradually. ‘‘I became aware of things when he wrote the essay. It wasn’t all that original — people who had had the same experience had said similar things — but with all the spelling mistakes, he had a way of putting things.’’

Stubblefield also revealed that the two had engaged in a “consensual” sexual relationship. Daisy, knowing that her son couldn’t engage in physical or emotional intimacy, reported Stubblefield to the police. The last time Daisy spoke with Anna in August, their phone call was recorded, and detectives listened on the other line.

‘Yes, [D.J.] wanted to be physically involved with me, and I wanted to be physically involved with him,’’ Anna said on the call. “Our relationship is not just about or primarily about the sex part. We love each other very, very, very much, and I wouldn’t have sex with somebody that I didn’t love.”

Who Was Anna Stubblefield Husband?

Anna Stubblefield married Roger Stubblefield, a tuba player for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The couple married in June 1989 and welcomed a son and daughter a few years later. According to The New York Times, the family was living in their upscale West Orange, N.J. home when Anna started falling in love with D.J.

Anna opened up about her relationship with Roger later in court. ‘‘The marriage wasn’t great,” she admitted, “but I wasn’t at a state of wanting imminently to end it.’’ She testified that it came down to a choice of whether she wanted to hurt Roger or D.J. ‘‘There wasn’t any choice. I wasn’t going to hurt [D.J.].’’

In testimony at a pretrial hearing, Roger said he realized his marriage was in trouble when ‘‘the prosecutors came and banged down the door.’’ The couple still went marriage counseling, and he said the therapist’s first words were, ‘Anna, you must stop dwelling on this relationship with [D.J.].’”

What Happened In Anna Stubblefield’s Trial?

In 2013, Stubblefield was charged with two counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault. Because FC was not recognized by science, the court ruled that “no evidence related to FC would be considered,” per Netflix. In 2015, the jury found Anna guilty on both counts, and she was sentenced to two, 12 years terms in prison.

Two years later, Stubblefield’s verdict was overturned by a New Jersey state appellate court in 2017. According to Slate , the three-judge panel ruled that the judge in Stubblefield’s original trial “unfairly excluded evidence related to the man’s capacity to give consent” and granted her a new trial with a new judge. Anna accepted a plea deal, pleaded guilty to criminal sexual contact, and was sentenced to time served.

Where Is Anna Stubblefield Now?

Anna Stubblefield was released from prison and lives out of the public eye. She has not seen Derrick Johnson since 2011. Meanwhile, D.J. still lives with his mother and spends time with his brother John and the rest of their family. He does not use facilitated communication anymore.

Tell Them You Love Me is streaming on Netflix.

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‘Brats’: How Jon Cryer and Andrew McCarthy thawed their icy Brat Pack relationship

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Jon Cryer and Andrew McCarthy did not shy away from discussing the longtime animosity that came along with the glaring spotlight of being young Brat Pack actors. And the two recently shared how they finally buried the hatchet as adults.

“When we had done ‘Pretty in Pink’ together, we did not get along because he was a d—,” Cryer said Friday at a screening for McCarthy’s new documentary, “Brats.”

“That’s very true,” McCarthy said during the Q&A, according to People .

The actors, who co-starred in the 1986 movie written by John Hughes, apparently spent years on each other’s bad side, not unlike their high-school characters Duckie and Blane, who both harbored feelings for Molly Ringwald’s Andie.

The Brat Pack Strikes Back : Why One Writer Is Weary of His Words

SOMEBODY ONCE said to me, “If you had a nickel for every time somebody said to you, ‘If you had a nickel for every time the phrase Brat Pack was mentioned, you’d be rich.’ ” It took me a little while to figure out that logic, but I think it’s probably true.

June 21, 1987

Cryer, 59, who went on to win two Emmys for “Two and a Half Men,” said a fateful 2012 meeting in a greenroom for “The View” helped them make amends. McCarthy, 61, who went on to direct in TV and film, confirmed that he apologized to his former co-star, and Cryer described it as “a lovely moment.”

“It was lovely because it was like within a moment, it was just so clear that we were teenagers and that does not, that in no way defines who we are now and it was just so lovely. It was immediately warm,” Cryer said.

Cryer, McCarthy and several other members of the Brat Pack reunited Friday at the “Brats” world premiere in New York. The actors appear in the new documentary about what it meant to be part of that group, which got its sensational sobriquet from a 1985 profile about Emilio Estevez. The actors — billed as Hollywood’s Brat Pack by writer David Blum — starred in the 1980s movies “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “The Breakfast Club,” “Sixteen Candles” and “About Last Night,” among others.

McCarthy managed to get Cryer — whom he described as “Brat Pack adjacent” — Estevez, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe and Lea Thompson to sit for interviews for the doc, which begins streaming Wednesday on Hulu. (Other members of the famed clique include Judd Nelson, Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, Timothy Hutton, Matt Dillon and Nicolas Cage, with Matthew Broderick, Matthew Modine and Kevin Bacon on the side.) Blum is also interviewed in the film, which is based on McCarthy’s 2021 memoir “Brat: An ‘80s Story.”

“If you were coming of age in the 1980s,” McCarthy says in the “Brats” trailer , “the Brat Pack was near the center of your cultural awareness. But for those of us experiencing it from the inside, the Brat Pack was something very different.”

“The Resident” and “Good Girls” actor laments how his career and those of his cohort were “branded” by that 1985 New York Magazine article, leading him to hate the Brat Pack for decades.

Appearing Monday on “Good Morning America,” McCarthy said he used the documentary as “an opportunity to re-connect with the old gang,” most of whom he hadn’t seen in more than 30 years, and discuss the infamous moniker and its professional ramifications. While the public embraced the group, the industry reacted to them negatively.

“It was such a seminal moment in all our lives, and none of us had ever talked about it before. So I thought it’d be good to go see what everybody felt about it,” he said. “It was such a crazy thing when it first happened to us, we all hated it, and over time it’s become this wonderfully iconic, affectionate term. I just wanted to see what everybody’s relationship to it was, because it is like a relationship. It’s followed me, every day I hear it. “

A look inside Hollywood and the movies : Remember the Brat Pack? Well, Now That They’re Grown Up. . .

They seemed to come out of nowhere--or perhaps they all sprang full-blown from the head of John Hughes.

Oct. 24, 1993

The “Weekend at Bernie’s” star said he hadn’t seen several members of the pack for years, let alone hung out with them. He was surprised that his co-stars were willing to talk about the moniker, suggesting that even 10 years ago, they probably wouldn’t have readily discussed it.

McCarthy, who described himself as a “loner,” said he last saw Lowe about 30 years ago and Estevez at the 1985 premiere of “St. Elmo’s Fire.”

“Our lives just led elsewhere. Because the Brat Pack, what initially happened was we perceived it as such a negative thing, we all kind of scattered,” he said. “By the naming of it, it kind of ended it in a certain way, and then the public knew better and embraced it and just took it to their hearts, and it took on a life of its own.”

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Nardine Saad covers breaking entertainment news, trending culture topics, celebrities and their kin for the Fast Break Desk at the Los Angeles Times. She joined The Times in 2010 as a MetPro trainee and has reported from homicide scenes, flooded canyons, red carpet premieres and award shows.

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'Robot Dreams' an animated fable fit for kids, but adults will cherish it most

Wistful, wordless film set in the new york of the ‘80s expresses something profound without wasting a word..

A dog shows his new mechanical friend around 1980s New York City in “Robot Dreams.”

It’s one of those strange but immutable truths of the movies that a song like Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” can play in roughly a thousand films before a movie about a dog and a robot comes along and blows them all out of the water.

The animated “Robot Dreams” is wordless, so the songs play an outsized influence in conjuring its whimsical and gently existential tone. But the movie, a 1980s New York-set fable about loved ones who come and go, doesn’t just use “September” for a scene or even two. It’s the soundtrack to the friendship between Dog and Robot (yes, those are the protagonists’ names in this disarmingly simple film), and its melody returns in various forms whenever they’re reminded of each other.

To a remarkable degree, “Robot Dreams” has fully imbibed all the melancholy and joy of Earth, Wind & Fire’s disco classic. Just as the song asks “Do you remember?” so too does “Robot Dreams,” a sweetly wistful little movie that, like a good pop song, expresses something profound without wasting a word.

Remembering is also helpful when it comes to the film, itself. Its release comes more than a year after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and months after “Robot Dreams” was Oscar nominated for best animated film . But for whatever reason, the film is only arriving in North American theaters this month.

It’s an unconventional release pattern for an unconventional film. “Robot Dreams,” adapted from Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel, is likewise an all-ages movie in a curious way. It’s very much for kids, but it’s also so mature in its depictions of relationships that older generations may swoon hardest for it.

“Robot Dreams” begins in the East Village where Dog lives a rather lonely life. Before he sits down to eat a microwave dinner, he notices his solitary reflection in the TV screen. An ad sparks Dog to order the Amica 2000. A few days later, a box arrives, Dog assembles its contents and soon a friendly robot is smiling back at him.

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Together, they have a grand old time around a New York colorfully rendered with pointillist detail. They jump the subway turnstiles, visit Woolworths and rollerblade in Central Park (with “September” playing on the boombox). But after an outing to Playland (which looks much more like Coney Island), Robot’s enthusiasm gets him into some trouble. After frolicking in the water, he lies down on the beach and later finds he can’t move. This may be a movie about a Dog who rollerblades and a Robot who eats hot dogs, but the scientific reality of rust is one suspense of disbelief too far for “Robot Dreams.”

Despite all of Dog’s efforts, Robot is stuck, and, this being September, the beach is soon closed for the off-season. Much of “Robot Dreams” passes through the seasons while Robot dreamily sleeps through the winter and Dog is forced to go on with his life, and maybe try to meet someone new.

The dreams of each can be surreal; Dog has a bowling alley visit with a snowman who bowls his own head, while Robot imagines a “Wizard of Oz”-like fantasy. But both are consumed by fears of their friend’s abandonment while progressively finding new experiences and friends. New characters enter, with their own New Yorks (kite-flying in the park, rooftop barbecues) and their own soundtracks. “Robot Dreams” movingly turns into a story about moving on while still cherishing the good times you once shared with someone — a valuable lesson to young and old, in friendship and romance.

And even this sense of memory runs deeper in “Robot Dreams” than you might be prepared for. Director Pablo Berger, the Spanish filmmaker whose movies include the 2012 black-and-white silent “Blancanieves,” has filled his movie with countless bits of a bygone past, from Atari to Tab soda. The name Amica 2000 could be a pun for the Amiga 500, the early computer and harbinger of our digital present.

Even more dramatic, though, is the way the Twin Towers often loom in the background in a film so connected to the month of September. There, too, is a poignant symbol of companions, friends and family members who vanished, but whose memories still stir within us.

This is, you might be thinking, a lot for a cartoon about a dog and a robot to evoke. And yet “Robot Dreams” does so, beautifully. And it will leave you curiously lifted by the spirit and lyrics of one of the most-played wedding songs of all time: “Only blue talk and love, remember/ The true love we share today.”

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Movie Reviews

In 'brats,' '80s stars grapple with a label that defined their early careers.

Eric Deggans

St. Elmo's Fire cast members Rob Lowe, Ally Sheedy, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Mare Winningham, Judd Nelson and Andrew McCarthy. Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images hide caption

How you feel about Andrew McCarthy’s searching, earnest, frequently self-important and occasionally clueless documentary about Hollywood’s so-called “brat pack” of actors — titled, somewhat self-consciously, Brats – may depend on what you think about the whole phenomenon in the first place.

Brats does a great job reminding us why we should care about the subject at all. It notes that the success of teen-focused films in the 1980s — specifically John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink , along with Joel Schumacher’s St. Elmo’s Fire – represented a turning point where the film industry began to feature coming-of-age movies, often with the same group of young actors.

McCarthy, who was in both Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire , joined a group of burgeoning talents who would become major stars, including Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald and Rob Lowe. The films they starred in — often featuring high school-age kids in various circumstances struggling to find love or acceptance — channeled the struggles of youth across the globe, turning them into Beatles–level stars in the process.

“Hollywood discovered the box office potential of a young audience,” McCarthy says in somber narration over clips from films as disparate as Risky Business, Dirty Dancing, Back to the Future, Footloose and Weird Science . “It seemed that every weekend, there was another movie and another movie and another movie about and starring young people. In the history of Hollywood, it had never been like this.”

Ally Sheedy, Demi Moore, Jon Cryer, Andrew McCarthy, and David Blum at the Tribeca Film Festival. Michael J. Le Brecht II/ABC hide caption

Defining the Brat Pack

But then journalist David Blum wrote a story in 1985 for New York magazine titled “Hollywood’s Brat Pack,” centered on time spent partying with Estevez, Lowe and Nelson, that cast shade on the group — lumping them together as unprofessional and over-privileged, while sticking them with a moniker which would follow them all around for decades. (One line described them as “a roving band of famous young stars on the prowl for parties, women, and a good time,” shortly before noting none of them had graduated from college.)

McCarthy, who admits he aspired to be a particularly serious actor back then, really bristled at the term, refusing to talk about it publicly very much. In another delicious irony the film fails to explore, Blum’s original article refers to McCarthy in a way that implies the author may not have even seen him as a bona fide member of the Brat Pack back then — despite the actor’s insistence that the term affected how he was perceived in Hollywood.

Author Interviews

Andrew mccarthy recalls his brat pack years in a new memoir.

Which why it is surprising to see footage of him at the start of Brats , calling up actors he was never very close to but has been professionally linked with for nearly 40 years — suggesting they get together in front of cameras for a documentary he is directing and will star in — to actually talk about this Brat Pack thing.

Estevez, who the article called “the unofficial president of the Brat Pack,” seems wary even in talking for the documentary, while eager to get some things off his chest. Relatively quickly, he apologizes for refusing to star in a movie with McCarthy shortly after the article was published, for fear of feeding the narrative.

“It was naïve of me to think this journalist would be my friend,” Estevez admits, while noting he had never participated in a major magazine profile before Blum’s story. “I had already seen a different path for myself. And I felt derailed.”

Jon Cryer, Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy on the set of Pretty In Pink in 1986. Molly Ringwald was not involved in the Brats documentary. Paramount/Getty Images hide caption

A movie with two messages

Scenes like this allow Brats to work on a few different levels at once. Through McCarthy’s own words and his catch ups with other Brat Packers like Estevez, Sheedy, Moore and Lowe, we get a sense of the people at the heart of a massive pop culture phenomenon.

This is a burgeoning genre in the documentary world: films and docuseries looking back at gigantic pop culture moments from decades ago, to reveal the unexplored cost for those at the center of things (think recent documentaries on Britney Spears and child stars on Nickelodeon). And there is value in hearing these performers, held up as legends for so long, grappling with the very understandable feeling they were stereotyped just as their careers were taking off.

“Why did we take [the term Brat Pack] as an offense?” Moore tells McCarthy earnestly in one moment. “I felt a sense of it being unjust. I just felt like it didn’t represent us…But I don’t know if I took it as personal over time as you did.”

Sheedy, Pretty in Pink co-star Jon Cryer and others talk about seeing the enthusiasm around these emerging stars suddenly curdle into insulting assumptions that dismissed their talents. And one of the elements which fueled their success — appearing together as a pack of friends in films — suddenly disappeared, as they all fled the stigma of the term.

But the other, perhaps unintentional effect of watching Brats , is revelation of how the sometimes clueless privilege these so-called Brat Packers enjoyed back then has stuck around, barely examined, decades later.

Balancing regret with gratitude

Making an impact in Hollywood is difficult. Starring in big movies, even more so. But starring in massive movies that are considered the voice of a generation? That is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

But, instead of feeling gratitude for landing in the right place at the absolutely best time to land parts in films like Class, Less Than Zero, Weekend at Bernie ’s and other hits, McCarthy seems to have spent way too much time fretting over whether the Brat Pack label kept him from larger stardom or more serious work. And it doesn’t seem a coincidence that the most successful Brat Packers McCarthy could get on camera — Moore and Lowe — long ago made their peace with a term that has evolved into a more endearing label, softened by nostalgia and filled with respect.

McCarthy asks a lot of good questions, including one that should be simple but really isn’t: Who is in the Brat Pack? Is it just the people Blum cites in his story — including Tom Cruise and Matt Dillon — or should it also include performers who worked with them around the same time, like Jon Cryer? (In Brats , Cryer tells the camera emphatically, “I am not in the Brat Pack.” It’s tough to tell if he’s joking.)

This film also breezes past something that was always a big sticking point for me when it came to Brat Pack movies — the decided lack of racial and ethnic diversity.

McCarthy talks to several fans, critics and experts about the Brat Pack phenomenon. But there is just one Black person who speaks briefly and very soothingly about these films’ lack of diversity, before author Malcolm Gladwell — who is biracial — pops up to assure the director that it made perfect sense for Hughes to center so many of his hit movies on angsty white kids in suburban Chicago.

For fans of color like me, there was always a double edge to the success of Brat Pack-style films. Many themes were universal, but there was a nose-pressed-to-glass element of watching celebrated characters in an environment light years removed from my own experience.

Characters of color, when they did surface, could be the butt of jokes. It would take the rise of Black directors like Spike Lee, Matty Rich and John Singleton to bring the Brat Pack’s youth revolution to Black-centered stories in much smaller films.

Bottom line: actors considered part of the Brat Park were packaged together in big budget films by producers and directors looking to tell certain stories and reach certain audiences. As several people tell McCarthy in the film, even after the article was published, lots of people thought the Brat Pack were still the cool kids in Hollywood – and wanted to be part of that club.

Many other talented performers got left out of that process. And complaining about what you didn’t get — when you did receive massive fame, wealth and career opportunities at an early age — feels a little uncharitable, especially so many years later.

Quizzing the guy who started it all

But then McCarthy actually sits down with the author of the New York piece, David Blum. And your sympathy for the actor and all the other Brat Packers rises again.

That’s because Blum mostly refuses to admit that his article was intentionally negative or sought to take down stars like Estevez and Lowe. He takes pride in creating the phrase, noting that he perhaps should have gotten credit for building the wave of publicity which helped make movies like St. Elmo’s Fire a hit.

But Blum takes little responsibility for how the piece’s negative tone might have impacted his sources — or the implications of writing, without any real warning, a story that seemed quite different from the original feature he had told Estevez he was assembling.

Pop Culture

The 'brat pack' grows up, but doesn't grow old.

It’s obvious that the actors featured in Blum’s original piece have mostly done well for themselves, crafting careers that outpaced the label he gave them. But even as he’s ending the interview, McCarthy can’t help pushing for an apology — asking the writer, almost plaintively, “Do you think you could have been nicer?”

Nearly 40 years later, it still seems tough for McCarthy to admit that accepting the label and living well — both because of and in spite of it — is likely the best possible response. (He seems to handle it all much better in a recent guest essay for The New York Times .)

It’s also obvious that watching him inexorably led to that conclusion while making this film — a journey brimming with nostalgia, pop culture potency and a bittersweet look back at youthful times — makes for one seriously compelling documentary.

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Critic’s Pick

‘Janet Planet’ Review: A Sticky Summer Full of Small Dramas

Annie Baker’s debut feature film is a tiny masterpiece — a perfect coming-of-age story for both a misfit tween and her mother.

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By Alissa Wilkinson

Kids are supposed to love summer, but I can’t be alone in remembering it as the most vexing season. It’s hot, and there are mosquitoes and spasms of allergic sneezes, and the predictable, sociable structure of the school year vanishes for what feels like an interminable stretch. When Lacy, the 11-year-old in the playwright Annie Baker ’s brilliant “Janet Planet,” calls home from camp to tell her mother, Janet, that if she doesn’t come pick her up, she’ll kill herself — I got that, in all its hyperbolic provocation. Sometimes summer is just the worst.

But being 11 is also the worst. “You know what’s funny?” Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) asks Janet (Julianne Nicholson) a few weeks later, when she’s been brought back to the home the two share in western Massachusetts: “Every moment of my life is hell.” Janet doesn’t want to laugh, and gently corrects her. But she’s also in the throes of her own turmoil, so she gets it. “I don’t think it will last, though,” Lacy continues, acknowledging with tween stoicism her spells of hell and happiness.

Lacy’s life is not hell, no matter her solemn belief. Her mother has built a good life for the two of them, even if it’s invaded at times by friends who need help and boyfriends who Lacy knows are bad news. But every day is long and every occurrence is amplified when you’re Lacy’s age. The genius of “Janet Planet,” Baker’s debut as a feature writer-director, is how flawlessly it renders what it’s like to spend the summer being 11 at your home in the woods, when your mother is your whole world and you wish you could just have her to yourself. You can hear the buzzing bug zapper, feel the sunburn on your skin, scratch your knees on the freshly cut grass and sink into the hazy evening ennui.

Baker, who grew up in Amherst, knows the texture of those Massachusetts summers by heart. She also knows the kinds of people who populate the area, sending Janet and Lacy at one point to a midsummer mystical theatrical presentation, complete with larger-than-life puppetry, after which everyone is implored to take home all the extra zucchini the group grew by accident. “Janet Planet” is a tiny masterpiece, and it’s so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin.

The film is divided into three big sections, centering on three adults who show up in Janet’s life, and thus Lacy’s, in the summer of 1991. First there’s Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s boyfriend, who was expecting to have the summer alone with her. Later, there’s Regina (Sophie Okonedo), who needs a place to stay after leaving a group that’s part commune, part theater troupe and maybe part cult. Finally, there’s the leader of that group, Avi (Elias Koteas), who takes an interest in Janet and her spiritual development.

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