BEFORE: Scarlett Johansson carries over again from "A Good Woman", and she'll be back later in the year in "Black Widow", which right now I'm tentatively placing between "Hellboy" and "Jojo Rabbit" as a lead-in to Halloween. If I have space for "Under the Skin" and "The Perfect Score" then it could be a whole other chain of 4 films with her in late September? I don't know, it's just a thought but it could happen that way - thinking about it now is the first step toward making it happen.
I'm really regretting not starting some kind of "March Marriage Madness" tournament on March 1, which would have justified keeping the romance chain going past the end of February. Is it too late, can I sort of back-date this, now that I know there will be 16 romance films in the month of March - you know, kind of like the "Sweet Sixteen"? Or am I going to hear from a bunch of lawyers telling me that "March Madness" is trade-marked, and I have to change the name of my promotion to "Spring Marriage Insanity"? You never know, everyone's afraid to use the term "Super Bowl" in their advertising and every product has to use the generic term "The Big Game", it's just dumb.
Anyway, how would that even work, like would I take the first two films of March and square them off against each other in the first "game"? And then some kind of bracket system that moves each film forward to the next level, until there are just two films left in the finals? That sounds ridiculous. But I'm so doing that. OK, "Just Like Heaven" vs. "Home Again", two Reese Witherspoon films - both were charming, but nobody was married in "Just Like Heaven", so it almost doesn't count. It's a DQ, and "Home Again" moves on. Next, it's "Set It Up" vs. "Just a Kiss". Hmm, "Set It Up" had two bosses almost getting married, and the other film sucked. "Set It Up" is the winner. Match-Up three is "Rent" vs. "Opening Night". Hmm, no marriage in either one, really, except two women got engaged in "Rent", but didn't make it to the altar - anyway gay marriage wasn't legal in the 1980's, but "Rent" still squeaks out a victory. Then there's "In Good Company" vs. "A Good Woman", which is really a push, same score. Dennis Quaid is married in the first one, and Scarlett Johansson is a young bride in the second. Eh, I'll give the edge to "A Good Woman" for having the Oscar Wilde pedigree, but neither film will probably make it to the finals.
So there you go, four films so far have advanced to the Elite 8 in March Marriage Madness - "Home Again", "Set It Up", "Rent" and "A Good Woman". Today's film really is the top seed in the whole bracket, coming in with a strong six Oscar nominations and 1 win. It's the film to beat - I still need to play the games out, but this one's a near-lock to move on to the next round. It's fun, right? I mean, it's stupid, but it's also fun.
THE PLOT: Noah Baumbach's incisive and compassionate look at a marriage breaking up and a family staying together.
AFTER: SPOILER WARNING, proceed no further if you haven't yet seen "Marriage Story". I can only go so far tonight without revealing specifics of the plot, generalizations are not gonna do it today...and there are bits near the end of the film that should be experienced first-hand.
There's really another warning label that should be front and center on the poster, as this film may remind divorced people of the process that they went through, and they may experience that sick, sinking feeling that they had IRL. If you ask me, the film should have been titled "Divorce Story" instead of "Marriage Story" but that would probably have been marketing suicide. I can already tell that some stress dreams are headed my way as a result of watching this. What's that long German word for the feeling that your life is spiraling out of control, only you suspect that you caused it through your own actions or inactions, and nothing that you do now will stop it? Some form of "Weltschmerz" mixed with "Angst", I suspect.
Anyway, there hasn't been an Oscar contender completely on the topic of divorce since "Kramer vs. Kramer", and that was way back in 1979, right? Surely much has changed in the world since then, and we're overdue for an update on the topic. Baumbach was certainly headed in that direction with "The Squid and the Whale", a film I watched in 2018, and I've also been catching up across the board with other Baumbach films like "Kicking & Screaming" and "Frances Ha" last year. But here it doesn't take much investigating to figure out that Baumbach found the inspiration for "Marriage Story" from his marriage to Jennifer Jason Leigh, and the divorce that resulted. To some degree that makes this film review-proof, like I can't nitpick and say, "Oh, that wouldn't happen that way..." or "Nobody would do that..." if it already happened to him. But the trick then lies in figuring out where this fiction might deviate from reality, and if this is just a thinly-veiled roman a clef. Even if it is, there may still be things that are not specific to that one particular marriage, and may in fact be universal.
I believe it takes some cojones to put pieces of your life into a screenplay - I tried several times but I couldn't manage to complete anything coherent. Here's what we know: Baumbach and Leigh also have a son, they lived in NYC, like the character of Nicole, Ms. Leigh was most famous for being in a teen sex comedy ("Fast Times at Ridgemont High") although she's done a lot of work since then. But to some degree she probably put her career on hold to be a mother, as many women still do - here they changed the male lead from a film director to a theater director, but for all we know, the rest may be spot on, we weren't there.
But here's what I know about marriage - in order for it to work, there needs to be some kind of equilibrium. If there is any imbalance, that can affect the long-term nature of the relationship. In years past one person needed to be more active and the other person more passive, and for many decades this meant the man made the decisions, drove the car (literally and metaphorically) with women in the passenger seat. This way of thinking is now quite outdated, but modern relationships still need to have some form of a driver and a passenger on many issues, or else conflict ensues. One person (male or female) may take the lead on some things, and ideally their partner would have other strengths or talents and take the lead on others. (NOTE: I'm using "men" and "women" here to make a point, but the same principles apply to same-sex relationships. I made a reference last week to gay marriage and how the people who fought for it somehow didn't see gay divorce coming, and I heard this reflected a few days later in the comedy routine of Cameron Esposito - thanks for confirming my hypothesis.) But a relationship between two "Type A" personalities just isn't going to work, neither is one between two passengers - you can't have active-active or passive-passive, especially if the couple both works and lives together. Sometimes you see a couple running a restaurant together, where one is in charge of the kitchen, and the other controls the front of the house. This is less common but still represents a form of equilibrium, because each is taking the lead on a different front.
And here's what I know about divorce - it's a lawsuit at heart, so by nature there needs to be a plaintiff and a defendant. Again, active vs. passive, at least on paper. One party sues the other party, claiming wrongdoing or neglect - my ex-wife ended up taking the heat on that one, she agreed to be the defendant, wearing that scarlet letter, even if it wasn't true, because it was the quickest path. We had no kids, no furs, no jewelry, no boats, no tangible property to divide except the VHS tapes and the condo, which was only 1/10 paid for. I had to raise 1/20 of the value to buy her out and get her name of the mortgage, and it was the best money I ever spent. Marriages come and go, but real estate is forever.
We didn't have very expensive lawyers, we went through a mediation process, which I recommend. Technically there were two lawyers, but really we only worked with one to work out the terms ourselves, and at the start of "Marriage Story", the main characters are using a similar process with a mediator - so it looked for a minute like the film was going to take a very safe route, but also one I've not previously seen explored in a film. But this leads to a NITPICK POINT for me - each character is asked to read a list of the traits they like and admire in their partner, but that seems more like couples counseling than separation mediation - did Baumbach inadvertently conflate the two processes? Anyway, Nicole can't bring herself to read her list of Charlie's good traits, she's mentally not the right space to do that, because reasons. But if she had, maybe they wouldn't have gone ahead with the divorce - no such luck, these characters need to go through their very awkward individual hells before things will start to get better.
Eventually papers are served, and Nicole moves out to L.A. to work on a TV series - which had always been part of the couple's plan, only they'd planned for her to move back to NYC after. Time apart, though, plus a consultation with a divorce lawyer, one who encourages Nicole to start thinking about what's best for HER and what she wants out of life, leads to her filing divorce papers, and then the separation process starts to get jumbled up and more complicated from there - Charlie tries to stay in New York and work on his play, while flying out to L.A. at various times to spend time with their son, and also search for a lawyer to represent him in California, despite his insistence that they are still a "New York couple". Umm, it seems that ship has sailed already.
The California divorce laws turn out to represent the height of absurdity. Charlie meets with an expensive shark-type lawyer that he can't afford, and then with a looming deadline retains the "nice guy" lawyer, but still gets bogged down in his "Catch-22"-like advice. The lawyer advises him to get an apartment in L.A., which will look better in court than living in a motel, however this also bolsters Nicole's argument that they are no longer a "New York couple". Other things are done to look better in court, only the lawyers' goal seems to be to avoid a court appearance, so why is everything done for the court's sake? Perfect casting here, getting Alan Alda, who complained about the absurdity of army regulations in "M*A*S*H" for many years, to play a lawyer pointing out the absurdity of divorce law.
In the end, getting divorced is like any other loss, it's similar to the death of a family member, like when a mortician presents you with many options, which all feel terrible, and you would honestly not have to be in such a position at all, let alone making decisions. But it's too late, you can't go back and do anything different to fix things. Or imagine it's a restaurant where you like none of the food, or are allergic to it all, but you still have to choose something and eat it. Better metaphor, if the marriage is a car, and the couple in question are the driver and passenger, in a divorce situation that car is headed over the cliff. Maybe there's a point at which you can turn the car in a new direction, but if you wait too long, the momentum's going to keep the car going, even if you slam on the brakes. Your best bet at that point is to grab what you can from the car (like your kid, if he or she is in the back seat) and jump out. But the car's going over, if you stay in it too long you've got yourself a "Thelma & Louise" situation, and nobody wants that.
With Charlie and Nicole, there's a late strategy switcheroo, and he goes back to the more expensive lawyer - now everything becomes evidence in a hotly contested case, like who's the better parent, who drinks more, who put their career on hold, who makes more money now, who had an affair, it all becomes grist for the lawyers' mill and comes out in court. To me, this is the equivalent of staying in the car as it goes over that cliff. Somebody should have jumped out when they could.
There's a powerful argument after that where Charlie and Nicole end up screaming at each other in his L.A. apartment, and it's terrible, violent and ultimately cathartic. What's very real about that is that it doesn't change anything between them, it's just a release that some people might find hard to watch. For myself, I've been in a version of that scene, where I admit I said some hurtful things that I didn't mean and probably shouldn't have said. My situation was such that during and after my divorce people family and friends cut me a lot of slack, I heard a lot of people saying, "Well, clearly this is not your fault.", which was somehow both helpful and not helpful. Because I knew that my actions or perhaps inactions played a role in getting to that point, so I couldn't possibly have been as blameless as others might have believed. Or maybe that was just something that people say out of courtesy when they don't know what else to say, I'm not sure.
But the scene that was even harder for me to watch was when Charlie was being visited by the court-appointed observer, and he explains the "knife trick". Man, I was squirming in my seat because that's not something you should even bring up to someone who's evaluating you for a court case to determine your fitness as a parent. Look, in the middle of a tough workday I might put two fingers in my mouth and mime blowing my brains out, but that sort of thing is not funny. If I had a friend who told me they did that with a real loaded gun, only they didn't shoot it, I would still be very concerned about them. Anyway, the "knife trick" sounds like a very convoluted thing, something that a person might come up with after the fact to explain away a suicide attempt. Mr. Baumbach, I hope that's not really the case for you, and if it was, I hope that you reached out and got the help you needed. No relationship is worth losing your life for in the end.
This film could have easily devolved into excessive flash-backery, as so many films do these days, so I appreciate that it started in a bad place and kept moving forward. I think the only flashbacks were in the opening montages, to help establish the two main characters, and then after that, Baumbach showed great restraint in remaining linear. Also, who the hell knew Adam Driver could sing so well? I knew he was a theater guy, and has done a lot of respectable theater work, but he sings a Sondheim number here near the end, and maybe he should be cast in a musical right away.
And as I thought, somewhere between 2004 and now, Scarlett Johansson got some better acting advice, where she displayed real emotions and she wasn't just smile-sulking or acting like a robot trying to mimic human feelings. Unfortunately my system doesn't allow me time to go back and watch all of her films in the order they were filmed (not released) so I could maybe pinpoint when, exactly, she gained some ability to act, by which I mean being present in the moment and not all caught up in over-thinking how to react to things, which really is the anthithesis of acting. Perhaps someone else could go through her filmography chronologically and determine this. Perhaps it was during the three films she made with Woody Allen, 2006-2008, or maybe "Iron Man 2" was the turning point, I'm not sure.
Also starring Adam Driver (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Happy Endings"), Alan Alda (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Ray Liotta (last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), Azhy Robertson (last seen in "Rough Night"), Julie Hagerty (last seen in "The Story of Us"), Merritt Wever (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Mark O'Brien (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Matthew Shear (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)"), Brooke Bloom, Kyle Bornheimer (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Mickey Sumner (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Wallace Shawn (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Robert Smigel (last seen in "The Week Of"), Rich Fulcher, Lucas Neff, Martha Kelly (last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Tunde Adebimpe (ditto), Jasmine Cephas Jones, Mary Wiseman, Matthew Maher (last seen in "Wonder Wheel"), Becca Blackwell, Eric Berryman, Pete Simpson, Amanda Rovner
RATING: 6 out of 10 hacked e-mails
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