Marriage Story – review | scenes from a marriage falling out of love

Marriage Story (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2019)

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Listening to his father’s fifteenth studio-album, Blood on the Tracks (1975), Jackob Dylan – the estranged child of Bob and Sara – recognised it as “my parent’s talking,” a conversation in lyric between two people once so familiar. His remark is, of course, belated, having only properly understood their divorce with the hindsight afforded by time; and yet, by contrast, the simplicity of his phrase reminds us of how such damage is registered in the mind of a child (simply understood, they just appeared to be “talking.”) Henry Barber (Azhy Robertson), the child of Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, might have understood his parents’ divorce in a similar way, conscious of his pendulum swing between their two embraces, the confusion of life distilled into a minor civil war of sorts.

The narrative of Dylan’s album, much like Baumbach’s film, is of course just one side of things, tilted, hardly a univocal measurement of their heartbreak. Marriage Story is partially inspired by his divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, as well as that of his parents, a story – quite literally, as the title would imply – of two people falling out of love, a devastating and harrowing event to unfold. Charlie (favouring the East coast) is a successful director of amateur theatrics, lean and tall, as if borrowed from Woody Allen’s Manhattan in many ways; whereas his wife, Nicole (favouring the West coast), is a former teen actress who now plays the lead in his productions. Unable to reconcile their differences, the two reject counselling in favour of marriage lawyers, the python-like Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern) hired by Nicole and Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta) used by Charlie, respectively; their participation, ironically, demands a theatrics to the weather of the proceeding, one ugly and turbulent in every aspect.

Tuning characteristic elements of his prior films, The Squid and the Whale (2005), Margot at the Wedding (2007) and The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) most evidently, Baumbach again pursues familial ties, disappointment, and the polished, New Yorker-esque shine of his everyday people. Marriage Story is far more calibrated than his other works – which, recurrently, seem to be underpinned with their own brand of cynicism – uncovering every faultline of the human experience whilst, thankfully, suggesting grounds for hope. Randy Newman’s animated soundtrack, largely confined to the piano, boosts such a promise with every note played, lending softness to the remains of the day; we might compare such use of music to Baumbach’s evident inspiration, Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1974), only here minimal and quieter throughout. 

Marriage Story deserves all the praise it has inevitably received, especially for the understated performance of Johansson, whose sunshine personality battles so evidently against the encroaching frontiers of divorce. Of the two, Nicole is the more empathetic, even if she is less understood.

Undoubtedly one of the best films of the year.