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What’s Missing from the Brilliant “Marriage Story”

Noah Baumbach’s new film, “ Marriage Story ” (currently in theatres, and coming to Netflix on December 6th), isn’t so much a story of a marriage as it is a story of stories—of the stories that are told about a marriage as it dies, the role of those stories in the lives of those who are soon to be exes, and, above all, the frameworks that give rise to those stories and prove to be inseparable from their substance. Baumbach’s prime strength as a director is his vision of talk as action. “Marriage Story” is his strongest film because it turns the very basis for that talk into a crucial part of the action—and it goes in surprising directions to reveal the personal importance of such talk and the high price (both literally and emotionally) that its protagonists pay to unleash it.

The movie begins with an elegant ruse: a pair of voice-over monologues by its married couple, Charlie Barber ( Adam Driver ) and Nicole Ryder Barber (Scarlett Johansson). The monologues detail what each loves about the other: Charlie cites Nicole’s emotional understanding, familial commitment, wide range of skills, personal intensity, total dedication to their son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), and willingness to spurn a burgeoning career as a movie star to work with Charlie in the theatre. Nicole speaks of Charlie’s self-sufficiency, his avidity, his orderliness, his paternal devotion, his strength as a “self-made” man who came to New York from a troubled family and made the theatre—a company that he founded—his home.

These speeches prove quickly to be, in effect, letters never sent, spoken only internally by the two characters. Nicole and Charlie wrote them at the recommendation of a separation mediator, in order to read them aloud at a session in his office. But when the mediator (Robert Smigel) asks them to begin, Nicole puts a stop to the process by refusing to read her piece or to hear Charlie read his. Nicole’s refusal suggests the fragility of her state of mind—the risk that, in reaffirming the couple’s frayed bond, she’ll lose the power to sever it. In effect, the entire movie is one of duelling monologues, spoken and unspoken: two hours of sharp, painful, witty, and elegant talk that is nonetheless rooted in the impossibility of communication. Baumbach presents the elusive nature of love, the ineffable spark at its core and the realm of practicalities by which it’s defined and realized. He testifies to the phrase by Pierre Reverdy made famous by Jean Cocteau: “There’s no such thing as love, there’s only proof of love.”

Though it long remains unclear why the couple is divorcing, it’s clear that Nicole’s dissatisfaction is driving the process. The couple have collaborated on a new production of “Electra” that’s about to move to Broadway—but without Nicole in the lead role. She is marking the separation by relocating to Los Angeles, her home town, for a role in a TV pilot. She moves back in with her mother, Sandra (Julie Hagerty), an actress, and her sister, Cassie (Merritt Wever), also an actress. She gets to work on the TV show, and displays her keen dramatic instincts in the face of oblivious instructions from a studio director. The show’s producer, Carol (Sarah Jones), invites Nicole to join the writers’ room, but she responds that she’d rather direct. Carol also offers her the name of a good divorce lawyer, Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), unaware that Nicole and Charlie had promised each other not to hire counsel.

But Nicole does consult with Nora, and from the time of their first meeting Nora more or less dominates the rest of the film with her lethal effectiveness and wide-ranging insight. When Nora tells Nicole that the point of their meeting is to state plainly what she herself wants, Nicole’s frustrations come out along with her reminiscences. She describes how she and Charlie met and instantly fell in love when she was about twenty, a young Hollywood star in a frivolous movie, and he was a talented young stage actor. She joined his theatre company, lent her name to it, brought attention to it—and soon, she says, it was Charlie who became “the draw.” Her prominence shrank, his status rose, and all the while she was fitting into his life—his apartment—leaving her with little identity. He rejected all her suggestions that they live in Los Angeles, and hardly cared that she was cast in the lead of a major TV pilot. She felt that her desires, her interests, and her personality had become subordinated to his, effaced by him—even as he was putting scenes from their marriage and remarks that she made into his plays. It’s almost as an afterthought that Nicole mentions that Charlie had an affair with a co-worker, a stage manager named Mary Ann (Brooke Bloom).

Nora’s sugar-sparkled mien reflects her clear and combative sense of what women are up against. She deploys her legal skills to win for her female clients in court a measure of the equality and the fairness that they’ve been denied in the more amorphous (and less supervised) settings of work and family. She freely admits that “the system rewards bad behavior,” and her version of this behavior is to reframe Nicole’s view of Charlie and their marriage in order to present as devastatingly negative a portrait as possible, in the interest of making maximal claims regarding property and custody and other matters of contention—above all, in the interest of helping Nicole realize her long-stifled plans and desires.

As the legal clash heats up, with Charlie in New York and Nicole in Los Angeles, “Marriage Story” becomes a tale of two cities and of two forms of media, television and theatre. (Movies are only in the deep background.) Nicole wants to live in Los Angeles and pursue the onscreen career that she’d turned her back on when she decided to be with Charlie in New York. She wants not only to act but also to direct. More than anything, she wants to live away from Charlie’s casually and cavalierly dominating presence.

The crux of their dispute is the custody of Henry. Charlie is no less devoted to him than Nicole is, but Nicole’s decision to reside in California more or less guarantees that the boy will live there with her, and Charlie will have to fly over for periodic visits or receive him for vacations—unless he himself moves. That’s why Charlie’s baseline demand is for Nicole and Henry to return to New York after her series is filmed. Baumbach, presenting Charlie’s perspective as a New York resident with a theatre company and a major production in the works, and his claim that Nicole, too, is a New York resident, doesn’t stint on the practical inconveniences of legal procedures to make such a case—the high cost of a lawyer (Charlie consults one who requires a twenty-five-thousand-dollar retainer), the sheer inconvenience of the related travel, and the stress of the contention (including the fear of being spied on by a private detective).

Charlie’s empathetic, humane lawyer, Bert (Alan Alda), explains the legal system of divorce to Charlie—it’s designed, he says, to protect poor and abused women from deadbeat husbands. And, though Nicole is far from poor and Charlie isn’t a deadbeat, what emerges is that she is, in a crucial way, abused—and that the circumstances of her marriage led her to feel not merely unhappy but voiceless. Nora and the legal system enable Nicole to tell her story seemingly for the first time. The system also weaponizes that story, turning it into an instrument of power. Part of that power involves the tailoring and reshaping of the story to satisfy the anticipated desires of the legal system, whether judges or court-appointed examiners. One key subplot involves Charlie’s clumsy effort to put on a show of fit parenthood for one such expert (played by Martha Kelly), and Nora’s effort to tailor Nicole’s personal narrative to satisfy the same expert. As part of that effort, Nora delivers a monologue regarding the excessive, unfair, and deeply ingrained expectations placed on mothers, a declaration of lucid observation and just anger that, at both screenings I’ve attended, was received in the theatre with applause.

Some of the best twists in the movie involve lawyerly battles (a third, played by Ray Liotta, is also involved). Avoiding spoilers: in the course of legal hearings, Nicole has the sense that her point of view, in Nora’s reshaping of it, is finally being heard by Charlie. Her view of him, of her life with him, of their marriage, is hitting home, wounding his pride, shattering his self-image, bursting his own veneer of amicability, and tapping into his own repressed torrent of frustrations. (He also vents his turmoil and confusion in a piano-bar rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s song “Being Alive”; Driver delivers the song in a few ardent long takes, which also sparked movie-house applause at both screenings.)

Baumbach offers, throughout the film, a warm-hearted and sharply comedic set of behavioral nuances and fillips of dialogue, a finely wrought network of family relationships and work connections. He displays the vanities and uncertainties, the kindnesses and the missteps that evoke the sense of full and complex lives. Yet that intricate texture is also both fragile and diaphanous, revealing in action the frameworks that give it definition. In Baumbach’s vision, when that fine fabric of daily life is rent by emotional turmoil, those frameworks show through all the more conspicuously. Theatre is one such structure; family is another; and the law turns out to be another such structure, and a critical one, which—for all its inconveniences, absurdities, distortions, and pressures—offers a crucial spark and form for life-changing emotional revelations and recognitions.

That’s why, when the couple’s pent-up passions emerge in a scene of unstructured, unmediated personal confrontation, what is revealed is a horror, one that, in its monstrosity, shows, once and for all, exactly why the marriage has ended. Nicole speaks her mind and conveys her experiences and feelings, more or less rephrasing what had emerged in her talks with Nora. Charlie’s retorts are cruel, hateful, self-centered, and abusive. They both lash out in anger, but Nicole starts from a baseline complaint—that Charlie repressed her individuality—and his arrogant rejection of her claim merely demonstrates its validity. If the terrifying scene has a peaceful conclusion, it’s one that’s dramatically earned: it defines the movie’s arc, presenting the confirmation of Nicole’s perspective. The outburst’s chaotically flying elements will settle back into order in the legal framework—not to mention the artistic one.

It’s impossible to ignore parallels between Baumbach’s life and his work. As reported by Ian Parker in his Profile of Baumbach in The New Yorker , in 2013, Baumbach was married to the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh for five years. (Leigh, of course, comes from a notable family of movie people, as does Nicole.) Baumbach and Leigh separated in 2010, soon after the birth of their son. The following year, Baumbach and the actress, writer, and director Greta Gerwig began a relationship. They had worked together on his movie “Greenberg,” which was filmed in 2009; as Parker reports, “Baumbach and Gerwig firmly place the start of their romance at a point after his separation,” and adds, “Baumbach thinks that aspects of his divorce might eventually appear in his work.”

What’s peculiar about the presentation of Nicole and Charlie’s divorce, from the perspective of a male director who, like Charlie, uses aspects of his personal relationships in his work, is (spoiler alert) the happy ending. Nicole enjoys a fulfilling personal life and great professional success apart from Charlie in her new life, and this cuts both ways. It’s simultaneously a tribute to her untapped abilities and an accusation levied against Charlie for not acknowledging or fostering them, but it also lets the character behind the scenes—the director, Noah Baumbach, who in real life went through a divorce from a major actress—off the hook. In effect, the filmmaker tells the world, she’s better off without me.

That’s also where “Marriage Story” reveals its limitations. Baumbach’s canny and intricate construction of the film’s action and dialogue makes “Marriage Story” his most developed and original film. But he doesn’t risk breaking his own frames to acknowledge the offscreen dramas, the lives behind the characters, and what his movie implies for them. Charlie is presented as a dramatist who makes use of his and Nicole’s private life in his own work; the implications are nowhere in the movie. It’s that opacity to itself that blocks the way for “Marriage Story” to the summit of cinematic achievement.

Marriage Story

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.

• 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
• Jennifer Lame
• Noah Baumbach
• Randy Newman

Cinematographer

• Robbie Ryan

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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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Marriage Story Review: Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson’s Best Work

Marriage Story is Noah Baumbach's funny and poignant meditation on divorce, one with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson's best work.

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Charlie and Nicole are the married couple on the train. You’d be forgiven if you didn’t notice though. Despite the pair being the toast of Off-Off-Broadway, with him the prestigious director of an underfunded theater company and her its brightest star, when they come back from a party, they’re not on the same page—they’re not even on the same subway bench. Nicole sits quietly on the 3 train’s empty pew, and Charlie stands across the aisle, despondent. They are still together, and given their marriage story includes the birth of a loved son, they always will be, in a way. But they’re headed in different directions even when they’re on the same track.

This is one of the many provocative images percolating in Noah Baumbach’s sweet and unexpectedly warm film about the end of a marriage, but not entirely the love it was built upon. Forty years after Robert Benton essayed the struggles of divorce with the solemnity of a war crime in Kramer vs. Kramer , Baumbach crafts a more complex, intimate, and funnier film that makes the pain of truly irreconcilable differences all the bitterer. It is Baumbach’s most mature effort to date, and one that offers career-defining turns for its two leads, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson .

Fittingly having just debuted at the New York Film Festival , Marriage Story is defined by its NYC identity. In fact, it’s that insistent outer borough charm which proves the catalyst for a divorce that begins amicably and ends with lawyers gleeful about a “street fight” in court. For while Nicole (Johansson) admires that Charlie (Driver) is the transplant who is more New Yorker than any narive, she’s never really felt rooted there. Ten years after she moved to the city and gave up a budding film career to be with Charlie, she’s taken a television pilot back in Los Angeles, which also just happens to be where her mother and sister are… and where she and Charlie were married, as well as where their son was born.

That distinction of marriage licenses and son Henry’s (Azhy Robertson) birth certificate turns out to be titanic as far as the legal system is concerned. Charlie might be a great father, but he is also greatly involved in his own work and self-image as an emerging Broadway wunderkind, and he can no more imagine living in the sunny soullessness of LA than he can in a world where Henry isn’t nearby. But he might have to choose as, for the first time in years, Nicole is actually pursuing what she wants, especially after taking a meeting with high-powered SoCal attorney Nora (Laura Dern).

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As one of the most idiosyncratic and dry screenwriting voices of his generation, Baumbach has infused his many scripts with the pain of growing up. Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha struggles in hipster Brooklyn like a millennial Annie Hall, and Gerwig’s very different screwball protagonist in Mistress America is still unsure how friends could ever settle down in the Connecticut suburbs. But with his two most recent efforts between The Meyerowitz Stories and Marriage Story , Baumbach has focused on less easily solvable problems.

In tackling divorce, the director is as insistent as his characters that he doesn’t want to turn this into a battle of wills or venomous accusations, but by nature of what Charlie and Nicole are going through, the hurt feelings and recriminations are inevitable. Beginning the movie on sweet, parallel notes of praise each party wrote about the other during an arbitration session, the film glides through the good times via montage—and then never lets those brief remembrances go. It is perhaps those fleeting feelings that allows Charlie, who is clearly built on Baumbach’s own knowing experiences with a bicoastal divorce, to be so delusional to think that divorce will neither affect his directing work or his relationship with his son.

Still, Marriage Story has few illusions. While the picture favors Charlie’s vantage on the whole while he struggles mightily to fly between California and New York to see his son—including by being forced to rent an apartment in Los Angeles in order to legally argue Henry should live in New York—it’s also acutely aware of his own selfish hypocrisies. There is something perfect about the metaphor of the husband as a director and the wife as the most prized member of his ensemble. She might be his favorite actress, but at the end of the day she is a pawn for his vision, and one increasingly seen by all those around them as an accessory to his career’s ascension.

Johansson, in the best work of her career, carries an indignation that is still too formless to identify as resentment. Yet it forms an invisible chain around her neck. In her first meeting with Dern, love turns to frustration and then exasperation as she relives a decade in a moment. It’s about a five-minute soliloquy that encapsulates years.

And the lawyer she tells this too also underlines Baumbach’s unmistakably droll sensibility. While things become evermore heated as Nicole and Charlie head toward court, and Henry begins forgetting that he also lives with his father, the movie maintains a gallows sensibility. It manifests in moments like Dern’s preternaturally ingratiating attorney taking off her shoes while listening to a sob story, or the way she can be all hugs and kisses with Ray Liotta as the slimiest lawyer in LA. But it can also be found in the amusing way that Nicole and her mother Sandra (Julie Hagerty) bicker about whether Sandra will still be friends with Charlie. “You might be getting divorced, but Charlie and I have a special relationship that’ll last forever!”

Reminiscent of the more sophisticated comedies of the ‘70s, there is a pervasive melancholy throughout Marriage Story that makes the laughs more ludicrous and the subsequent reality unbearable. Through it all Johansson and Driver offer peerless work. One special highlight is near the end of the film where Charlie, ever the showman, can finally find the words to express his anguish by singing (in full) a musical number by Stephen Sondheim. It’s a devastating crescendo of bottled up emotion. Finally, the workaholic artist who cannot find the words to direct his own life bares it all. It is a true high-note after the preceding two hours, which featured its own chorus of tears and smiles, and an acceptance that even after the final curtain. the feelings left behind will always linger. Including the love story that remains.

4.5 out of 5

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

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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’ 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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Film Review: ‘Marriage Story’

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are a couple who enter the divorce zone in a Noah Baumbach drama that's so accomplished it elevates the writer-director of 'The Squid and the Whale' to a whole new level.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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“ Marriage Story ” is the Noah Baumbach movie we’ve been waiting for. It’s better than good; it’s more than just accomplished. After 10 features, released over a quarter century of filmmaking (his debut, “Kicking and Screaming,” came out in 1995; his other films include “The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg,” and “Frances Ha”), this, at long last, is Baumbach’s breakthrough into the dramatic stratosphere. At once funny, scalding, and stirring, built around two bravura performances of incredible sharpness and humanity, it’s the work of a major film artist, one who shows that he can capture life in all its emotional detail and complexity — and, in the process, make a piercing statement about how our society now works.

The movie is a drama of divorce, and when it’s over you may feel like you know the lives it’s about as well as you know your own. Yet “Marriage Story” isn’t just the tale of a marital breakdown and its aftermath. It’s a film about divorce: how it operates, what it means, its larger consequences. Television periodically confronts this kind of thing (on “Big Little Lies,” say), but if you’re wondering when it was that a movie last dealt with the subject of separation on such a big-picture scale, you might have to go back 40 years — to the era of “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Scenes from a Marriage,” and “Shoot the Moon.” “Marriage Story” makes a worthy addition to that canon, though so much has changed. Divorce was commonplace back then, but this is the first film set inside what might be called the divorce-industrial complex. It’s about two people coming to terms with a process that, however necessary, is more wounding at times than their heartbreak.

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As the movie opens, we hear the voices of Charlie ( Adam Driver ) and Nicole ( Scarlett Johansson ), who’ve been married for 10 years and have an 8-year-old son, Henry (Azhy Robertson). As the two take turns describing what each one cherishes about the other, their lists are accompanied by a montage of moments from their domestic life, which are staged with such resonantly casual detail — the way Charlie brushes the hair off his nose as Nicole gives him a bathroom scissor cut; the way she leaves her Zabar’s and Pink Freud mugs standing around with teabags in them; his face-stuffing; her jar-opening; the family’s hyper-competitive Monopoly games — that though we don’t even know these characters yet, you grin with recognition. The montage tells us something vital (that Charlie and Nicole have never stopped loving each other), and it therefore raises a question: Why are they getting divorced? Couldn’t they work it out?

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It’s Nicole who has instigated the split. She’s an actress, raised in Los Angeles, who had an indie It Girl moment (she starred in a sexy hip romance called “All Over the Girl”), and then, after falling in love with Charlie, moved to New York to marry him and become the star of his downtown experimental theater company. They were in their twenties, gifted and successful, and once their son was born they created a nice life in Park Slope. As far as Charlie is concerned, he’s living the dream. But Nicole had periodic stirrings about relocating to L.A., which Charlie “discussed” but never took seriously. That’s because he’s a New York guy. Besides, his troupe is based in New York, and he directs the shows, including an “Electra” that’s headed to Broadway. How could they possibly move?

Nicole, however, now has the chance to star in a TV pilot that could lead to a series. And what she realizes is that though she loves her family, she has spent the marriage living Charlie’s dream, putting hers on perpetual hold. There are ways to solve this kind of conflict, of course; that’s what the growing pains of a good marriage are about. But Baumbach has captured how taste, personality, and ego can add up to one stubborn road block. There’s a telling moment when Charlie, the avant-garde dynamo, reminds Nicole that he doesn’t watch television, as the film flashes over to a glimpse of the “cool” horror movie he’s watching instead. This is the sort of male credibility distinction that means everything and nothing — but in this case, it means more than Charlie knows, since his dismissal of “television” includes a kneejerk diminishment of the centrality of Nicole’s career.

It’s the old New York-vs.-L.A. values debate, the one mythologized in “Annie Hall,” only the way this plays out in “Marriage Story” is far more lacerating. Nicole, convinced that Charlie loves everything about her except for the yearnings that challenge his, heads to L.A. to shoot her pilot. She takes Henry, crashing at the home of her mother, Sandra (Julie Hagerty), a former TV actress herself. There’s no debate about whether the divorce is happening; it’s on.

But here’s where the drama begins. Charlie still doesn’t get it. He accepts that his marriage is over, and he and Nicole, who are not wealthy (he funnels the money they make back into the theater company), agree not to get into a war over dividing the spoils. All well and good. But Charlie still thinks they’re “a New York family.” He’s not a bad guy, but he’s so innocently self-directed that even in divorce, he thinks he’s going to have a version of the life he had before. They’ll live a few blocks from each other and share custody of Henry!

But that, of course, isn’t the way it works. Divorces are infamous for monetary blood feuds, but what happens when you have a kid, and one parent wants to live across the country? How do you divide that ? Charlie trails Nicole out to L.A., and what he learns, as soon as she hires the celebrity divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), is that there’s the life he was living, and there’s divorce world, in which appearance becomes reality, the court system isn’t listening to the nuances of your desires, and the lawyers charge such bankrupting fees that as soon as you’ve entered the battle you’ve lost the war.

At least, that’s how Charlie sees it. All he’s trying to do is maintain his connection to his son, and he feels like a criminal. (The fact that Henry likes L.A., along with trendy L.A. things like sock pants, didn’t figure into Charlie’s plans.) There are two sides to every divorce, and in “Marriage Story” Baumbach divides our sympathies in a most ingenious way. More than half of the 2-hour-and-16-minute drama is told from Charlie’s point of view, so it seems as if the divorce is all happening to him. And since Adam Driver is an intensely sympathetic actor, we can feel, as Charlie gets buried under circumstances beyond his control, that we’re “on his side.”

But Baumbach peels back the truth of this marriage, layer by layer. And we start to see that Charlie, for all his affection and intelligence, doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. The scene in which Johansson’s Nicole relates the story of their marriage to her lawyer is a blistering tour de force. The action she has taken may be brutal, but it’s right for her. This is a movie about New York vs. L.A. that’s really about the battle between the 20th-century cult of the Creative Dude and the 21st-century reality that women have many more choices than they once did.

It’s also about how the system of divorce, as it now operates, can be one big messed-up s—t show. Charlie learns that he’s not allowed to hire a lawyer his wife has consulted with even once (and she went to a ton of them). He learns that the court will expect him to have a home in L.A. (lest he seem like a visiting derelict), but that once he rents an apartment there it just increases the case for saying that they’re an L.A.-based family. (Talk about damned if you do… ) He finds a schlubby family lawyer (Alan Alda), who basically tells him to cut his losses, then hires his own $950-an-hour attack-dog attorney (Ray Liotta). When Liotta’s raspy bulldog and Dern’s righteous legal Valkyrie face off in court, we hear the raw facts of the couple’s lives twisted into the most warped shapes.

Yet one of the powerful subtleties of “Marriage Story” is that the divorce process, flawed as it is, becomes the vehicle through which Charlie and Nicole confront the underlying reality of their marriage. They go to court, and tear up their lives, all to solve a problem that Charlie, if he was a different sort of man, could have solved in two minutes.

Baumbach’s brilliant screenplay never falters or hits a wrong note. He has come up with smart, witty, saddened, and searching characters whose ability to articulate their feelings is never less than lifelike, and he writes scenes that are like verbal arias. When Nicole shows up at the generic apartment Charlie has rented, the two try to “work things out,” but as they descend into a zone of raw accusation (You’re a slob! You’re a dictator! You used me to further your career! You slept with that stage manager!), the dialogue is like Bergman in media-age overdrive, and Johansson and Driver deliver it in such a fiercely connected fit of anger that the scene wounds, enthralls, and moves you to tears.

The supporting actors, in their way, are every as memorable, from Dern’s iron-clawed feminist crusader (her speech about why there will always be different expectations of mothers and fathers is a ripsnorting classic) to Liotta’s beady-eyed straight-shooter to Mary Hollis Inboden’s scene-stealing performance as a family-court evaluator who is such a disaffected space case that the moment she walks in the door to judge Charlie’s fitness as a father, she stands in for everything that’s inadequate about the divorce process. (She gets to top off the film’s most delicious running joke, which is that everyone — even an evaluator weighing in on a custody hearing about where Henry should live — reflexively recommends L.A. for “the space.”)

Late in the film, there are two scenes built around Stephen Sondheim songs from the great 1970 musical “Company.” “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” is performed by Nicole and her mother and sister at a party, while Charlie does a rendition of “Being Alive” in a piano bar after work. They add up to a haunting yin-and-yang of male and female perception. Driver’s wistful performance of “Being Alive” could almost stand in for anyone’s view of marriage. Yet marriage, though it can feel to those of us who cherish it like the difference between being alive and being nowhere, isn’t always enough. “Marriage Story” captures that truth with such an exquisite combination of love and heartbreak that it leaves you chastened and enraptured.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Competition), Aug. 29, 2019. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 136 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of a Heyday Films, Netflix production. Producers: Noah Baumbach, David Heyman. Executive producer: Craig Shilowich.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Noah Baumbach. Camera (color, widescreen): Robbie Ryan. Editor: Jennifer Lame. Music: Randy Newman.
• With: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Azhy Robertson, Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, Julie Hagerty, Alan Alda, Mary Hollis Inboden, Wallace Shawn, Merritt Wever.

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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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'Marriage Story' Reveals The Messy, Heartbreaking Toll Of Divorce

Justin Chang

No one outside a marriage can know the truth of it, but actors Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson bring the audience awfully close in Noah Baumbach's devastating drama about splitting up.

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NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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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Review: It’s a ‘Marriage Story,’ but about divorce

This image released by Netflix shows Adam Driver in “Marriage Story.” (Netflix via AP)

This image released by Netflix shows Scarlett Johansson, left, and Adam Driver in “Marriage Story.” (Netflix via AP)

This image released by Netflix shows Laura Dern, left, and Scarlett Johansson in “Marriage Story.” (Netflix via AP)

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Noah Baumbach is a keen observer of life’s banalities. His films revel in the strange and wonderful and awkward things people say and do in the course of the day. But his real magic is turning ordinariness into cinema.

He can take that feeling of post-graduate paralysis or middle-age stasis, topics that are not exactly unexplored in film, and make them feel fresh and more lifelike and lasting than even your own memories.

His worlds are ones you feel like you already live in, even if he’s exploring an ugly moment that everyone would rather forget as soon as possible, as in his latest “ Marriage Story ,” which is actually about divorce.

It’s a subject that Baumbach has taken on before, in “The Squid and the Whale,” although this time he’s not coming at it through kids’ eyes, but the adults’. And it is a devastating and hilariously authentic look at a fracturing marriage, the casualties, the misunderstandings, the feelings and the absurdities of the legal system around it.

The center of this story is a couple, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver). She’s an actress from Los Angeles. He’s an acclaimed New York theater director. They met in the middle, when she was looking to escape her trajectory after a teen sex comedy and a too-young engagement and he was a promising nobody. She moved to New York and their lives for the next decade became intertwined, through work, marriage and a child, until it broke. There’s not exactly one inciting source for the split that we’re ever privy to, more like the culmination of 10 years’ worth of life that adds up to an untenable unhappiness.

We meet Nicole and Charlie in this moment of separation, but we’re already invested after hearing letters they’ve written about what exactly they love about the other person. But even knowing these things, the film lets you quickly understand that this relationship has fully curdled.

She’s going to Los Angeles with their 8-year-old son Henry (Azhy Robertson) to film a television pilot. He’s staying in New York and taking the play that once starred her to Broadway. They’re breaking up and they want to do so as painlessly as possible. No lawyers. Equal splits. Dream on, Charlie and Nicole, even nice divorces get ugly — there’s a whole industry there to make sure of it.

“Marriage Story” takes the audience deep into this world, showing how two people fully invested in splitting amicably can get swept up so easily in animosity and legal challenges. And Baumbach has written and cast the divorce lawyers brilliantly, with a crackling Laura Dern as Nora, Nicole’s lawyer. Alan Alda plays the sweet, coddling option for Charlie. His alternative is an expensive bulldog played by Ray Liotta.

Baumbach fills “Marriage Story” with a whole ensemble of memorable supporting characters who you only ever want to see more of. Merritt Wever, as Nicole’s sister, Cassie, has a wonderful scene with the divorce papers. Julie Hagerty plays Nicole’s daffy and sweet actress mother, Sandra. Wallace Shawn gets some laughs as an oversharing theater veteran. And there are a lot of fun, smaller roles from Baumbach regulars like Carlos Jacott, Jasmine Cephas Jones and Mickey Sumner, to name just a few. This is a film that gets better with each viewing. There’s so much going on in every scene you’re bound to miss much the overlapping dialogue and funny callbacks on the first pass.

But make no mistake, the film belongs to Johansson and Driver, two actors who get to really shine in ways audiences may have forgotten they could in the haze of their big franchises, or maybe have never even seen in this way before. Either way, both will make your heart ache.

Alone, they are excellent whether it’s Johansson trying to wrap her head around what went wrong or Driver simply singing Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive.” And together they’re on fire. In what is basically The Scene of the movie, Nicole and Charlie attempt to have a moment of civility that only devolves and escalates into one of those fights that comes right up to the line of being actually dangerous. Somehow both laughter and tears are an appropriate response to this showdown.

“Marriage Story” is such a perfect blend of writing, unflashy direction, spot on performances and score (by Randy Newman) that you hardly even notice all the individual ingredients making up the whole. Its triumph is that it just feels like life.

“Marriage Story,” a Netflix release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for “language throughout and sexual references.” Running time: 136 minutes. Four stars out of four.

MPAA Definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr

Review: Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson will break your heart in the masterful ‘Marriage Story’

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Charlie Barber (Adam Driver) is a director. Nicole Barber (Scarlett Johansson) is an actress. For years they have worked together at the same avant-garde theater company, and for years they have also been husband and wife, with a son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), who is now 8. At home one night in their Brooklyn apartment, Charlie offers Nicole a note on her latest performance, a longtime habit that seems particularly superfluous since she is about to exit the show and their marriage. But he offers it anyway: “At the end, I could tell you were pushing for the emotion.”

Like almost everything else in “Marriage Story,” Noah Baumbach’s scalding, wrenching and inexhaustibly rich new movie, the line serves more than one purpose. It’s a power move, a chance for Charlie to take Nicole down a peg in the guise of feedback. It’s also an honest insight between creative professionals who have built their life together around their art. It’s the movie’s challenge to itself, a promise that Driver and Johansson, both in peak form, will experience none of the same strain. There will be no pushing for the emotion here.

Most of all, it offers a crucial clue as to what “Marriage Story” is about. Of course it’s about the end of a relationship, and Baumbach, a peerless observer of domestic pettiness and passive-aggressive behavior, puts every unflattering detail under his dramatic microscope. His combination of rigor and empathy has already earned any number of critical superlatives, and I’m not here to dispute any of them. “Marriage Story” is an emotionally lacerating experience, a nearly flawless elegy for a beautifully flawed couple, a broken-family classic to set beside “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Fanny and Alexander,” to name two films that Baumbach references visually here.

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But it is also something else: not just one of the best-acted movies you’ll see this year but also one of the year’s best movies about acting. This should come as little surprise. From “Margot at the Wedding” to “The Meyerowitz Stories,” Baumbach has long been interested in the lives of privileged, cultured individuals with a tendency to self-dramatize. And if every marriage requires an element of pretense, then divorce may demand an all-out charade, especially if both parties are committed to the appearance of a smooth, amicable uncoupling.

Their initial script is one they have written, at a mediator’s instruction, in the form of personal letters memorializing their relationship. We hear them read those letters in voice-over, accompanied by flashbacks to happier times with Henry and set to a lovely, plaintive score by Randy Newman. There are home-cooked meals and games of Monopoly, afternoon outings and bedtime rituals. Charlie speaks affectionately of Nicole’s kindness and klutziness, and of her gifts as an actress. Nicole talks about what a good dad Charlie is, how much she admires his self-sufficiency and initiative. It’s clear that these two know each other inside out.

The actors seem to know them just as intimately. Nicole may seem the more recessive figure at first, but in Johansson’s tremulous but forceful performance, her easygoing vibe can harden suddenly into steel. Charlie is louder and brasher but also more guileless, and Driver uses his towering Franken-physique to suggest both a figure of authority and an overgrown child. The difficulties facing both actors are considerable — expository monologues shot in demanding long takes, conversations that take them across an entire spectrum of contradictory emotions — but they don’t rise to each challenge so much as absorb it. Together they turn Baumbach’s acerbic words and their own instinctive gestures into the language of a recognizably real relationship.

That relationship, rosy as it may look in retrospect, carries a history of unspoken resentments and uneven compromises. The Barbers’ separation comes at a moment of great professional opportunity for both of them: Charlie’s play, a striking modern update of Sophocles’ “Electra,” is Broadway-bound, while Nicole has landed the lead role in a TV pilot in Los Angeles, where she grew up. She and Henry relocate to L.A. for a spell that Charlie assumes will be temporary, though it becomes clear that his assumptions — plus a spot of workplace infidelity — are what motivated Nicole to begin divorce proceedings in the first place.

The acting metaphor becomes explicit when Charlie flies out to meet Nicole in L.A., and she enlists the help of her mother, Sandra (Julie Hagerty), and sister, Cassie (Merritt Wever), to greet him with divorce papers. Both Sandra and Cassie are actresses too, and the ensuing comedy of errors plays like a piece of experimental theater, or perhaps an awkward improv comedy routine. No one is more thrown off-guard than Charlie: Who changed the script without his permission? Didn’t they agree to do this without lawyers?

Maybe they did — or maybe, as suggested by Nicole’s formidable attorney, Nora (a splendid, take-no-prisoners Laura Dern), Charlie always expects everything to be on his terms. Left scrambling to find L.A. counsel even as work pressures mount in New York, Charlie must choose between Jay (Ray Liotta), a high-priced barracuda who rivals Nora in ruthlessness, and the kinder, more affordable Bert (Alan Alda, wonderful), who approaches the case with welcome warmth but little optimism. There’s no real victory in a $50-billion-per-year divorce industry that incentivizes its customers to behave as unreasonably as possible, even as it bleeds them dry emotionally and financially.

The lawyering up on both sides expands this tense domestic drama into a furiously barbed ensemble comedy in which everyone must play their part to perfection. Nora and Jay know that their job is not just to litigate but to perform, to bring some histrionics to the joint autopsy they’re conducting on the Barbers’ marriage. Charlie and Nicole are performing, too, rehearsing their testimonies and exaggerating each other’s worst qualities to elicit the most favorable outcome.

To a degree that is thrilling as well as depressing, Baumbach shows us how the bitterest divorces don’t just end a marriage but poison its very spirit. Innocuous comments are entered into evidence. Forgivable foibles are weaponized. Los Angeles and New York are dragged into the debate, twin cultural capitals that pit Nicole’s lifestyle ideal against Charlie’s. All this unfolds against a perfectly realized backdrop of chilly boardrooms, drab offices and an L.A. apartment that Charlie races to turn into a presentable home for himself and Henry. (The exquisitely unshowy cinematography and production design are by Robbie Ryan and Jade Healy, respectively.)

Speaking of Henry, a sweet, likable, ordinary kid caught up in a bitterly protracted custody battle, he becomes a prize and an inconvenience, a weight and an abstraction, something his parents end up fighting over more for their benefit than his. There’s an especially cruel irony here: Relentlessly playing the good parents — literally, when an evaluator (Martha Kelly) comes to observe Charlie with Henry — drains them of the time and energy they need to be the good parents they’ve always been.

This is hardly the first time Baumbach, now 50, has steered us through the emotional wreckage of a broken marriage, as he did 14 years ago in “The Squid and the Whale.” That picture was sharply drawn from elements of his parents’ divorce, and “Marriage Story,” though not explicitly autobiographical, has already provoked comparisons with Baumbach’s own.

You may well watch this movie hunting for clues and confessionals, or at least trying to gauge its sympathies. Do they lie with Nicole, who seems to have sacrificed and suffered more during the marriage? Or with Charlie, who has far less family support and seems far likelier to be the director’s onscreen surrogate?

Perhaps the surest sign of Baumbach’s integrity is that he refuses to provide an easy answer. His writing has rarely been more incisive, and it has almost certainly never been more generous or forgiving. Nicole’s aggressive legal strategy may strike you as too calculating by half, unless you understand it to be a long-overdue act of reclamation by a woman tired of putting her own needs and dreams aside. Driver’s performance does achieve the deeper, more lingering impact, in part because Charlie is granted the courtesy of more screen time, but that may well be because he has the most learning and growing to do.

And learn and grow he does. Toward the end of “Marriage Story,” Nicole and Charlie both sing numbers from “Company,” Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical about marriage and its discontents. These are lovely moments, richly textured snapshots of two people who have always been steeped in the arts. But when Charlie launches into his solo (“Someone to hold me too close/Someone to hurt me too deep”), you’re seeing something close to sublime: a man who has managed to embrace his pain and feel more alive, even hopeful, for it. For one shimmering moment, giving a performance and telling the truth suddenly become one, never to be put asunder.

‘Marriage Story’

Rating: R, for language throughout and sexual references Running time: 2 hours, 16 minutes Playing: Opens Nov. 6 at Vista Theatre, Los Angeles, and the Landmark, West Los Angeles; starts streaming Dec. 6 on Netflix

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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‘Marriage Story’ Review: A Beautiful and Devastating Look at a Marriage’s End

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‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Is About To Pass One of the Biggest Flops of the Year at the International Box Office

Kevin costner and ryan reynolds' action thriller might be bad, but it's awesome at this, inspired by a true heist, this jason statham thriller is a must-see for guy ritchie fans.

This is a re-post of my review from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. Marriage Story is now streaming on Netflix .

One of the best things I can say about Noah Baumbach ’s excellent new movie Marriage Story is that even if I wasn’t a child of divorce or if I wasn’t married now, I’d still find it emotionally overwhelming because he makes me care so deeply about the two people at the core of this story. Marriage Story doesn’t function as a screed against marriage or divorce. The film isn’t trying to make its divorce stand in as a prime example for all divorces. What Marriage Story shows is that divorce is where love and hate collide, and ending a marriage isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Led by astounding performances from Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson with some terrific supporting work from Laura Dern and Alan Alda , Marriage Story shows the emotional warfare between a couple not in broad, melodramatic strokes, but where the ground is constantly shifting beneath everyone’s feet.

Nicole (Johansson) and Charlie (Driver) Barber have already agreed to a divorce when the story begins. Nicole, an actress who was a vital part of the plays that Charlie, the director, made with their theater company, now wants to pursue a career out in Los Angeles, but Charlie wants to stay in New York City. Although they initially agree to no lawyers, Nicole decides she needs an advocate for her interests and hires the brutal and effective Nora (Dern). Charlie, not wanting to lose total custody of their son Henry ( Azhy Robertson ), then hires his own representation (Alda). As divorce proceedings continue, we see the resentments and slights that have built up over the course of the marriage come pouring out. What the Barbers intended to be an amicable parting eventually devolves into all-out war as a desire to “win” overshadows life after marriage.

Baumbach, working from memories of his own divorce, doesn’t simply approach this as “divorce is bad” even though things get emotionally ugly. Marriage Story doesn’t try to hold up an unhappy marriage as better than no marriage at all, nor does it ask you take sides. If anything, Baumbach is much harder on Charlie than he is on Nicole, but again, this isn’t a story about who was right and who was wrong. This is a story about the fallout. The movie devotes great care into showing not only how these two people have drifted apart, but also why they’ve drifted apart and why they can’t turn back from this emotional grinder. Rather than create some Rashomon -like narrative where you try to unpack what happened in the marriage, Marriage Story investigates what happens when the marriage is over and the difficulty in moving forward.

Although it’s easy (and fun!) to blame the lawyers, Marriage Story provides nuance to aspects of divorce that people who haven’t been divorced probably don’t think about. For example, it’s not just that divorce lawyers cost a fortune, but as Charlie’s attorney points out, you have two people fighting to stay close to their child and bankrupting that child’s college fund as a result. That’s incredibly dark and twisted, but it’s also a mundane reality. Charlie and Nicole don’t care that much about their personal property, but they obviously care deeply about Henry’s future. Charlie even observes that if Nicole is granted custody, he won’t get to see his son and he’ll stop being a parent. The stakes could not be higher and there is no simple resolution.

Everyone plays his or her character to perfection. Johansson has never been better, playing her most mature character to date. She has a long monologue where she recaps her view of the marriage, and the levels that Johansson has to go to tell this story—the story of her marriage as she experienced it and why it had to end—is powerful and relatable. She doesn’t cast Charlie explicitly as a villain or herself as a hero, but her matter-of-fact telling belies the emotional currents that have worn away at her over the years. Dern is electric as Nora, a shark of a lawyer who will go to hell and back for her client, but also with no emotional investment in the outcome. She’s callous in all the right ways for her profession, and in the hands of a lesser actor, she would just be a caricature, but with Dern, we just have to acknowledge that Nora is amazing at her job.

But the performance I can’t stop thinking about is from Driver. I thought Driver had already given one of the best performances of the year with his turn in The Report , and now he’s already topped himself with his work here. If I have one minor qualm with Marriage Story , is that after focusing largely on Nicole at the beginning, more of the story is given over to Charlie. And yet with Driver’s performance, I can’t really complain too much because he’s just an absolute powerhouse where he puts everything he has into showing the character’s emotional complexities and shortcomings. Even if you “blame” Charlie for the divorce (even though the film is indifferent to notions of blame in these circumstances), Driver keeps our sympathies not because Charlie is such a great guy but because the character is so fully realized and articulated. It’s possible I’ll see a better performance this year, but Driver has set a very high bar for 2019.

Marriage Story is not an easy movie, but it’s not an emotional grind either. There are moments of levity and moments of love. If we didn’t care about these characters and their divorce so much, it would be easy to check out, but Baumbach’s movie is endlessly compelling not because of hatred, but because of love. This isn’t some slow-motion car wreck, but the story of two people who loved each other now going through a process that demands their hatred, the kind of hatred you can only show to someone you loved with all your heart. Yes, it can be devastating to watch at times, but that’s because this story is worth a damn and I’m so glad Baumbach decided to tell it.

• Scarlett Johansson

Marriage Story

• Blu-ray edition reviewed by Chris Galloway
• July 20 2020

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A love story about divorce. A marriage coming apart and a family coming together. Marriage Story is a hilarious and harrowing, sharply observed, and deeply compassionate film from the acclaimed writer-director Noah Baumbach. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson deliver tour-de-force performances as Charlie, a charismatic New York theater director wedded to his work, and Nicole, an actor who is ready to change her own life. Their hopes for an amicable divorce fade as they are drawn into a system that pits them against each other and forces them to redefine their relationship and their family. Featuring bravura, finely drawn supporting turns from Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, and Laura Dern—who won an Academy Award for her performance here—as the trio of lawyers who preside over the legal battle, Marriage Story (nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture) is a work of both intimacy and scope that ultimately invokes hope amid the ruins.

Picture 9/10

The Criterion Collection presents Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story on Blu-ray in the aspect ratio of 1.66:1 on a dual-layer disc. The notes on the transfer state that this presentation comes from a new 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative. The word “new” throws me off a bit, but I’m going to assume that this master is the same one that Netflix uses for the film on their streaming platform as this doesn’t look too far removed from what appears there.

There wasn’t anything all that surprising here since I was expecting something that looks like what one would get on Netflix, if not even a little better, and those expectations have been met. It’s a highly detailed, consistently sharp looking presentation, that still manages to deliver some bold looking colours (at least in the L.A. sequences) and a wonderful film-like look thanks to its strong handling of the film’s grain. Blacks can be a little weak and milky, flattening out the picture during some of its low-lit sequences, like in the theater or bar settings, but to be fair, this could come down to lighting and/or film stock, and this still replicates the look on Netflix, even the 4K presentation (which has better blacks itself).

Damage isn’t an issue, the source looking to be spotless, and there are no digital artifacts to speak of, which would be an advantage over streaming technology with the improved bandwidth. All told, it’s a strong presentation.

The film comes with a surprisingly active 5.1 surround soundtrack, delivered in DTS-HD MA on this disc (it’s only offered in Dolby Digital 5.1 on Netflix through my Amazon Fire Stick). It’s of course a talky film, there is a tremendous amount of range and depth there, best shown in some of the shouting matches that occur. The mix can get a little playful when spreading out between the channels, though most everything still sticks to the fronts. Some effects, like planes and cars, work their way to the rears with some great direction. Randy Newman’s score also fills out the environment and it sounds razor sharp. All-around, it’s a fantastic track for the film.

(Criterion also includes a descriptive-audio track, presented in Dolby Digital 5.1, replicating a similar option that Netflix provides on their streaming service.)

Extras 7/10

Not up to what Criterion put together for their previous Netflix release, Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma , but they’ve still managed to put together a decent little special edition with a few nice touches. The supplements open with a new 21-minute interview with director Noah Baumbach , who explains the desire he had to not just make a movie about the mechanics of a divorce (right down to the almost police procedural-like elements that go on behind-the-scenes) but a film that’s also an examination of a marriage. He explains the desire he had to make both characters sympathetic, to show how people “perform” when going through divorce (which shows through more with the lawyers in the film) and why he felt this film deserved a look different from his previous films.

It’s an intriguing and thoughtful discussion about the creative process behind the film, and I figured the other interviews found on here would continue that, though sadly that’s not the case. A 20-minute feature around the film’s players (actors Scarlet Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, Julie Haggerty, and Alan Alda) is fine enough, with the performers talking about their draw to the film, working with Baumbach, how they were able to work with him on building their performances, and what it was like working with the other actors (Alda states fondly that acting with Driver in a scene felt like acting on the stage). But a short 12-minute one with the filmmakers (featuring Baumbach, producer David Heyman, editor Jennifer Lame, production designer Jade Healy, and costume designer Mark Bridges) feels more promotional in nature, with only some details about the thinking behind the costumes and finding the appropriate locations sticking out.

That last collection of interviews didn’t add much but this is made up for a little bit with the addition of a 96-minute making-of documentary. Though that might sound lengthy, at least a third of it is made up of clips from the film. The other two-thirds, though, are edited together from video journal footage and shows the intense preparation that went into a number of scenes. A lot of the footage shows Baumbach working through scenes with his actors, whether it be with Ray Liotta in how he needs his character to convince Driver’s his way is the only way, or working with Johansson what has been building up all these years in her marriage. You also get to watch Driver and Johansson work themselves down after what is the film’s most intense moment, and you also get to see some charming little moments, like Driver just hanging out with his young co-star, Azhy Robertson. I’ve seen plenty of making-of featurettes that follow a similar format, but this is one of the more engrossing ones I can recall seeing recently.

Following that is an 11-minute interview with Randy Newman  about the film’s score, mixed in with some footage of the recording session with the orchestra. There’s also a 7-minute video that looks to have been made for Variety ’s website, called Making a Scene with Noah Baumbach . This video simply features Baumbach in the L.A. apartment set (which was an actual apartment they located) talking about the planning that went into the final argument between Johansson’s and Driver’s characters, and how they needed to plan every detail, which included getting an apartment that was laid laid out and dressed up a specific way. The planning even went right down to the placement of the hole Driver would put in the wall. Amusingly, they actually placed fake walls over the actual wall so they could replace them and do many takes (which you can see in the included making-of) but Driver managed to still punch through to the apartment next door.

The disc then closes off with two trailers , each one just over a minute and focusing on the letter each character writes about the other. Criterion also includes an insert that features a reprint of an introduction written by Linn Ullmann to “a book of images issued by Assouline as a companion to Marriage Story ” in 2019. Criterion also packages this in a digipak, but in one of the coolest touches I can recall in recent memory, Criterion has placed reproductions of the individual letters written by the two characters about the other, right down to mistakes, cross-outs, and so on. It’s such a wonderful little touch.

Also of note, this release doesn’t feature a chapter menu, and the “timeline” feature that has been found on Criterion’s titles since the beginning, is also gone, meaning you cannot bookmark. This has happened before, primarily with releases for David Lynch’s films, because he doesn’t like the concept of chapter stops. What’s odd here, though, is that the disc still has chapter stops, 16 of them, so I don’t feel that is why this was done here. Either Netflix didn’t want it, or Baumbach didn’t want it (though it’s been on Criterion’s discs for his other films), or Criterion is dropping the feature and chose this title to start. Thankfully, they have still left the “resume” feature, which gives you the option to resume where you left off.

Overall, the material isn’t as strong as what was found on Roma , and in some respects it’s not so different from what a major studio probably would have put together, but the material is at least engaging (for the most part) and I do love the little touch of adding the letters to this release.

Not as impressive as their edition for Roma , but Criterion’s home video release of another Netflix film does provide a strong looking presentation, some engaging special features, and the clever addition of the letters written by the two characters. For those that are fond of the film it’s worth picking up.

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