TIFF 2019: Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019, USA)
Noah
Baumbach’s Marriage Story follows the dissolution of a marriage over the
course of 137 minutes. In those minutes, we come to find ourselves knowing the couple
– played by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson – as one knows a friend. These
are deeply rich characters with intensely complex inner and outer lives, expertly
written and fully realized in the two performances. This is the best film from
Noah Baumbach that I have seen so far – echoing the best of Bergman and Allen
in equal measure – but with a voice all its own.
The film
opens in media res, with Driver and Johansson in a divorce mediation session. This
sets off what in some ways is a story of two cities – New York and Los Angeles.
For Nicole, played by Johansson, moving to Los Angeles represents a reclamation
of her selfhood and acting career after what she perceives as years of playing
second fiddle to Charlie’s (Driver) success as a theater director. But as
Charlie is keen to remind Nicole, they are a “New York family.” One of the
central battles of the film is over where the couples’ young son Henry will end
up living in the wake of their separation.
Driver at
first believes that they will be able to handle the separation without a
lawyer. Over the course of the film, we watch as he begins to realize the impossibility
of this. His awakening from blissful ignorance of Nicole’s feelings to the
realization of her intense dissatisfaction with their marriage is deeply
powerful. Baumbach is a master of tragicomedy – numerous scenes in the film
transition from laughs to suffering in an almost seamless fashion. Driver and
Johansson show the ambivalence and complexities of the relationship – in one
scene, a mundane conversation turns to a heated argument, and then ends in
apologies.
The
supporting cast is uniformly excellent, with the lawyers Charlie and Nicole hire
– Ray Liotta and Alan Arkin for Charlie, Laura Dern for Nicole – garnering some
of the most laughs in the script. Baumbach cleverly does not pick sides in the
relationship, but he must realize that audience members will end up identifying
more strongly with Nicole or Charlie’s character at some point in the film. And
despite the pain in the film – and there is a great deal of it – Baumbach manages
most miraculously of all to maintain a sense of hope and reconciliation.
9/10
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