“MARRIAGE STORY”: Breaking up is hard to do

Scarlett Johanssen, Adam Driver

Published December 5, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene

My rating: B+ (Premieres Dec. 6 on Netflix)

136 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The opening moments of Noah Baumbach’s latest film finds a couple — Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) — rhapsodizing about the other’s best features.

Each has a laundry list of his/her spouse’s positive attributes.  My God, you think, these two are wildly in love.

Uh, no.  The cataloguing of lovable traits is simply an exercise developed by a marriage counselor.  In fact, Nicole and Charlie seem destined for the big split.

“Marriage Story” — which more accurately might have been entitled “Divorce Story” — is a black comedy that leaves audience suspended between laughter and wincing.  It’s about how despite the best efforts of the people involved, a marital breakup takes nightmarish turns.

It’s funny and heartbreaking.

Nicole and Charlie live in NYC with their adorable son Henry (Azhy Robertson).  Charlie is the director of a semi-celebrated experimental theater company; Nicole’s the leading lady  in most of their productions.

But Nicole has long felt stifled, artistically and emotionally. Over Charlie’s objections she takes a role in a TV series being filmed in Hollywood and with young Henry heads West to live — temporarily Charlie assumes — with her mother Sandra (Julie Hagerty). It eventually dawns on Charlie that Nicole won’t be returning to their life in New  York.

Now Nicole and Charlie are decent folk and they agree up front that while the marriage may be doomed, there’s no reason to become enemies.  They have a child to think of and, anyway, who wants to get all wrapped up in recriminations and resentments?  Why not just split up the common property and make it all as painless as possible?

Scarlett Johanssen, Adam Driver

If only.  Nicole inadvertently throws down the first gauntlet by hiring Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), a flamboyant divorce lawyer who invariably represents wives.  Nora nods agreeably as Nicole describes her hopes for a rancor-free split, then immediately starts a campaign that will make Charlie’s life a living hell.

The big sticking point is custody of Henry. To prove  his fatherly bona fides Charlie must make frequent visits to California; as the process grinds on he’s required to rent an apartment. He’s not wealthy to begin with and this bi-coastal lifestyle is a budget buster. (Imagine if the protagonists of this film had been working class…how could they ever afford these legal and residential shenanigans?)

Initially Charlie retains attorney Bert Spitz (an excellent Alan Alda), an avuncular fuddy-duddy grandpa type in rumpled corduroy who claims to understand the need for civility. But when Bert’s civility  proves inadequate to meeting the challenge of Nora’s scorched-earth efforts, Charlie switches to a high-powered shark (Ray Liotta) with a reputation for ruthlessness.

If “Marriage Story” has a major flaw it is that it spends more time with Charlie’s situation than with Nicole’s.  While she basks in the success of her TV show and newfound independence, Charlie finds that as an out-of-state dad he must justify every aspect of his life.

In one achingly uncomfortable scene Charlie must open his LA apartment to a social worker (standup comic Martha Kelly); everything goes wrong (it doesn’t help that an angry Charlie recently put his fist through the drywall) and it’s all soaked up by the maddeningly silent evaluator, who appears to suffer from personality deficiency disorder.

There’s much funny stuff here (Hagerty is priceless as Nicole’s mom, who if given her druthers would dump her daughter and keep Charlie); there is also an incredible amount of pain.  Lives are being uprooted; Charlie doesn’t know if he’ll be allowed to watch his boy grow up.

Despite the flashes of mordant humor, “Marriage Story” is essentially realistic.  The performances, particularly by Driver and Johanssen, are not flashy or overtly comic.  These are two decent people being eviscerated by the system.

Moreover, in its final passages Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale” and, more recently, Netflix’s brilliant “The Myerwitz Stories”) and his cast give us a real sense of the love that once existed between these two, and how that connection transcends even the horrors that are now being hurled at them.

| Robert W. Butler

Read the original review and more reviews at Butler’s Cinema Scene