Noah Baumbach’s award winning Marriage Story (2019) has been getting some backlash on social media after The Criterion Collection announced a director approved Blu-Ray release for July. One of the primary criticisms I have read is that Marriage Story deals exclusively with upper middle class white hipsters living in Brooklyn and that this type of milieu, coupled with Baumbach’s choice of narrative, is the kind of film that we see too many of and don’t really need right now. And while this is all maybe true to an extent, I think that this kind of simplification overlooks some really admirable qualities to Marriage Story.
Noah Baumbach has been telling stories about divorce for a long time; since The Squid & The Whale in 2003. But, until Marriage Story, Baumbach has been drawing from his parents’ divorce and not his own; which inevitably imbues a film with a unique kind of emotional urgency. Every scene in Marriage Story has dialogue that just crackles with regret and animosity simultaneously. Baumbach’s writing has now transitioned from the more literary style of Hal Hartley and Whit Stillman and into the realm of traditional melodrama where I think Baumbach has really come into an interesting and mature voice. Of course Marriage Story is as much about posturing as any of Baumbach’s previous films, but for the first time it feels like these characters are actually masking a truthful, fragile vulnerability.
Scarlett Johansson is particularly good as Nicole (probably her best since Under The Skin). She is able to sell the conflicting dualities of mother and wife subtly. It’s a minor change in the pitch of her voice when she goes from addressing an adult to a child accompanied by a softening around the eyes and mouth. It seems too often that male directors will instruct an actor playing a career oriented mother to perform their part with a steely reserve or emotional distance. Johansson feels present and spontaneous in all of her scenes. And, despite audience’s reservations, Johansson is quite able with comedy (the underrated Rough Night is evidence of this). It’s a real testament that in Marriage Story both Adam Driver (playing Nicole’s husband Charlie) and Johansson have managed to negate the baggage of their own celebrity from the Disney tent-pole productions The Avengers and Star Wars (both franchises reaching their conclusion in 2019).
Baumbach’s blocking in Marriage Story is much more assured than in his last couple of outings and it really helps to accentuate the actors’ choices in a scene. The way Baumbach stages the scene where Charlie fumbles his knife trick in front of the court appointed observer is as heartbreaking as it is hysterical. Driver is so wonderfully flustered and still trying so hard to play it cool while Baumbach keeps his characters framed together so a reaction shot isn’t even necessary.
Baumbach’s most masterful blocking comes much earlier in the film during the scene where Nicole hires her lawyer Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern). The fact that for so much of the scene the camera just sits with Johansson and lets her emotional arc really dictate every pan or cut felt right out of A Woman Under The Influence (1974). Yet, there are those moments where Johansson gets up and moves but the camera keeps a distance. Baumbach doesn’t even follow her when she leaves the room. This choice just smacks of classic Polanski in a lot of ways; I’m thinking of the moment in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) where the doorway keeps Ruth Gordon out of shot while she is on the telephone.
Every year the films that did well during the award season will inevitably receive some sort of backlash. Usually this backlash is simply a case of audiences and critics coming to their senses; realizing that a film that they found really exciting is actually far less than it appeared. Marriage Story is one of the rare exceptions to this phenomenon.
