Marriage Story

If love is a battlefield, divorce must be total warfare—with lawyers cast as the generals and ex-lovers as the grunts. I hesitate to drag the analogy into a proxy war, because if one relinquishes parts of one’s private life as a chit in a litigious game, who is the proxy for whom? This question is central to Marriage Story, which reflects on how marriage and divorce are part of the same campaign. But those things fit neatly into a zero-sum mentality; the substance that vouchsafes their continuity refuses to play that game.

For no good reason, I haven’t kept up with Noah Baumbach. The last film of his that I saw was Greenberg (2010)—on which he collaborated with his then-spouse Jennifer Jason Leigh, who costarred with then-ingenue Greta Gerwig—and, well, the spoiler-not-spoiler for this movie is that Leigh and Baumbach’s marriage didn’t work out. (Gerwig is his current partner.) But Baumbach’s amusement at his own suffering precludes, with perhaps one conspicuous exception, self-pity. Roman à clef point-scoring belongs to the world that he’s critiquing, so his wry detachment scans as civility. Yet the wall he builds is never more effective than when Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver tear it down—and expose it for the scar tissue that it is.

Baumbach’s tone may be a necessary component of the film’s bicoastal milieu, where privilege is checked like Louis Vuitton bags. Though Charlie fled Indiana to be an Off-Broadway director, and never looked back, Nicole is L.A. showbiz, born and bred (her TV-star mother, played by Julie Hagerty, not only drank that Kool Aid, she downed it with a shot of wheatgerm), but gave it all up to act in Charlie’s plays. He belongs on the East Coast, she on the West; their shaggy son Henry (Azhy Robertson) is stuck in between.

On one level, Marriage Story is a rom-com written by Kafka. Alan Alda’s cut-rate old windbag of an attorney seems to have lived (and died) in the bowels of the system. The spiffier sharks played by Ray Liotta and Laura Dern operate on different, and, some might say, gendered, frequencies of grievance—and I think it really is fair to say gendered because they have subsumed life experience into their respective sales pitches. (Dern’s client is Johannson’s Nicole and Liotta’s is Driver’s Charlie.) Where she secretes sympathy with strings attached, like an untouchably chic girlfriend who deigns to care about your problems, he goes right for your paranoia.

The opening montage plays almost like a commercial. Charlie and Nicole recount, over voiceover, why they love one another, and Randy Newman’s score flows over these domestic scenes like warm bathwater. Then, with a cold snap—Baumbach and the editor, Jennifer Lame, make cuts that crack like a whip—we are plunged into couples therapy, where Nicole refuses to read what she wrote and we have already heard. Showing these morsels of happiness, and then having them cut away, is a nice little bitch-slap to the indie-movie trope of vague, wordless flashbacks; but this is more than an ironic touch: the details in these encomia are planted like landmines.

Earlier, I mentioned that self-pity rears its head only once. It comes as a prelude to the couple’s inevitable confrontation—after cross-flung smears in their custody battle have frayed their relationship past politesse, to little more than exposed nerves. Nicole voices her distress that things have gone this far, even though she lawyered up first, on a whim, after they’d agreed to forego litigation. This, Charlie says, is what he wanted to prevent.

There might have been no stepping around this particular landmine, nor who planted it—however inadvertently. But argument ensues, accusations whiz past, targets are missed because shot in a rage. He thinks of the girls he could have fucked, he was on the cover of Time Out New York!!! She calls him selfish, he wishes her dead. The smoke clears, his hump throbs in her arms: her prehensile eyes steady in recognition—the fire put out. Although Nicole is referred to as the indecisive one of the pair, in the end, she knows what she wants and ends up getting it from another man, whereas Charlie needed to lose what he had in order to discover that he wanted it. A man of the theater, he discloses his recognition in song, and surrenders entirely when Nicole’s couples-therapy exercise turns up like a belated truce.