‘Marriage Story’ Review: Dance Me to the End of Love

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/movies/marriage-story-review.html

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Traditionally, a story that ends in matrimony is classified as a comedy. But what about a story that begins with the end of a marriage? Noah Baumbach’s tender and stinging new film, “Marriage Story,” doesn’t quite answer the question. It’s funny and sad, sometimes within a single scene, and it weaves a plot out of the messy collapse of a shared reality, trying to make music out of disharmony. The melody is full of heartbreak, loss and regret, but the song is too beautiful to be entirely melancholy.

Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) are an artistic couple living in Brooklyn with their 8-year-old son, Henry (the wonderful, deadpan Azhy Robertson). Both parents work in the theater: Nicole, a former teenage movie star (and a child of Hollywood), is a leading performer in the experimental stage company that Charlie, himself a sometime actor, directs. What we know of their life together is conveyed in an opening montage in which each partner, in turn, lists the things they love about the other. They’ve compiled these catalogs at the urging of the mediator hired to help them through their separation.

What follows — as an amicable split becomes a shattering rupture, lurching from awkwardness to rage in search of a new equilibrium — is a reversal of Tolstoy’s sturdy observation about happy and unhappy families. Happiness is unique, inexpressible, a state that exists outside of narrative. Misery is what makes you just like everyone else.

This is certainly the perspective of the divorce lawyers who soon replace that hapless mediator. Nicole, who has a role on a television pilot, takes Henry to Los Angeles, where her sister (Merritt Wever), their mother (Julie Hagerty) and Henry’s cousins live. This move, which Charlie insists is temporary — “we’re a New York family,” he says to anyone who will listen — becomes a point of contention between the spouses and their attorneys. Papers are served. Voices are raised. Henry, whose well-being is supposedly everyone’s chief concern, is pulled back and forth, his life wrenched out of sync.

Nicole and Charlie, onetime creative collaborators, become characters in a drama neither one controls. “We need to tell your story,” says Nora (Laura Dern), Nicole’s lawyer. Charlie visits two — a rumpled mensch (Alan Alda) and a shark in a suit (Ray Liotta) — and one of them urges him to “change the narrative.” For both parties (as they are called once their experiences are translated into legalese), this means rewriting a happy-couple past into a history of struggle.

The most painful parts of “Marriage Story” act out that revisionism, as idiosyncrasies are made to look pathological and mistakes are treated as potential crimes. The German social critic Theodor W. Adorno wrote that “divorce, even between good-natured, amiable, educated people, is apt to stir up a dust-cloud that covers and discolors all it touches,” an insight that Baumbach illustrates with vivid precision. He shows how “the sphere of intimacy” (to continue with Adorno) “is transformed into a malignant poison as soon as the relationship in which it flourished is broken off.”

The intimacy doesn’t just vanish. At their moment of most intense conflict — when the thin line between love and hate seems to have been irrevocably crossed — Nicole still calls Charlie “honey.” There is still a residue of sweetness between them, which offers hope, not necessarily for reconciliation but for a limit to the damage each will inflict and sustain.

What is happening is catastrophic, ridiculous and also — as the lawyers know — perfectly ordinary. Baumbach, exploiting and extending the tremendous talents of his cast, refuses to exaggerate. There are spasms of farce and throbs of melodrama, but they arise within the rhythms of everyday behavior. Which is not to say that Nicole and Charlie are confined to the shabby, somber stagecraft that so often passes for realism. They are large, complicated personalities with professional and emotional lives that fill their days, and the screen, with anxiety, surprise and occasional delight.

Baumbach works to be fair to both of them, and the effort shows. Like his other movies, perhaps even more so, this one feels personal. I don’t just mean autobiographical. In a few minutes on Google you can find out about his marriage, his parents, his in-laws and whatever else you want to know. That information only confirms what you have already intuited if you’ve seen “The Squid and the Whale,” “Margot at the Wedding,” “While We’re Young” or “The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Selected”: He draws from his own life.

But you shouldn’t expect the picture to be perfectly objective or symmetrical. In some ways, “Marriage Story” is harder on Charlie than on Nicole, underlining his self-absorbed, self-pitying tendencies, but he also occupies the film’s sympathetic center of gravity. It understands him better, even as Nicole has plenty of chances to explain herself. She seems to be the one who precipitated the breakup, whose expectations and feelings changed in ways that Charlie struggles to comprehend. He is blind to some of the consequences of his own behavior, which includes cheating on Nicole with a member of the theater company.

The infidelity is treated as a sidebar, which isn’t entirely convincing. And while “Marriage Story” delves into the tangled thickets of its characters’ feelings, it is coy — or maybe just tactful — about their sexual lives, together and apart. Nicole has a moment of lust (following a moment of fury), but Charlie is, libidinally speaking, a closed book.

The complexity of the film’s perspective — what Baumbach reveals and what he withholds, how he keeps up with characters whose circumstances are changing rapidly even as they feel like they’re stuck — places enormous demands on Driver and Johansson, who are simply extraordinary. They are perfectly matched, which is to say interestingly mismatched, given the trajectory of the story. Each one has a charisma that’s a little mysterious, a hint of Cubism in their faces, an undertone of irony in their voices. How could they ever have expected to know each other?

One of the morals of this story, chastening but also oddly encouraging, is that we don’t ever really know one another, but we’re nonetheless obligated to try. Lawyers do it their way, insisting on simple answers to difficult questions. This is the place to note that Alda, Liotta and Dern collectively come close to stealing the movie, in part because they are playing performers fully in their element in ways that Charlie and Nicole are not.

We sometimes see those two at work — there are some delicious tidbits of backstage comedy, in both New York and Los Angeles — but rarely onstage. There are two important exceptions, moments of theater that use borrowed words and self-conscious artifice to deliver strong doses of unadorned feeling. Both involve songs from Stephen Sondheim’s “Company”: “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” a jaunty complaint about falling for a charming narcissist; and “Being Alive,” a heartfelt lament about being one. That number, sung by Driver near the end of “Marriage Story,” is an anthem of need, building to the shattering realization that “alone is alone, not alive.”

That is a bleak conclusion, and it’s one that this meticulous and messy movie both acknowledges and resists. Bouncing between two large, opinionated American cities, Charlie and Nicole discover that other people are impossible and indispensable: children, colleagues, in-laws, exes, even sworn officers of the matrimonial bar. Alive is alive, not alone.

Marriage Story

Rated R. Sometimes mommies and daddies have feelings. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes.