Marriage Story – 2019 – R
Until the Golden Globe nominations were announced I hadn’t even heard of Marriage Story. But, there it was: Best Actor Drama, Best Actress Drama, Best Supporting Actress, Best Drama, Best Screenplay and Best Original Score. Good grief! I haven’t exactly been hiding under a rock when it comes to movies! Fully chagrined I clicked on Netflix and settled in, expecting to be overwhelmingly impressed. I wasn’t but that’s not an indictment by any means. The film was really good just not over the top Bravo! The storyline is actually quite common, one many of us have lived: marriage adrift, divorce, child custody, division of property….“let’s keep this fair and civil, do what’s best for the kids.” If we’re lucky, amicable works. If not, our lives grind to a brutal, angry halt while attorneys screw everything up and money rolls downhill so their kids can relax about college tuition while our kids start applying for financial aid. Watching Marriage Story is like sitting through 136 minutes of bad lawyer jokes springing to life. The horror.
Charlie (Adam Driver), a director of cutting-edge, avant-garde theater, positioned to take his latest work to Broadway, is married to Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), an actress fading from NYC stage renown but still popular in Hollywood. The couple have grown apart, recognizing, despite deeply caring for each other, the point of departure has arrived. Divorce is discussed. Their young son Henry (Azhy Robertson) is the beloved prize and both parents start out determined his interests be top priority. Then a wrinkle emerges. Nicole accepts a career revival offer to film a pilot in Los Angeles. She takes Henry with her to California, moving in with her Charlie-adoring mom (Julie Hagerty). On one of Charlie’s frequent coast-to-coast trips to spend time with his family, Nicole bullies her reluctant Charlie-adoring sister Cassie (Merritt Wever) to serve him with divorce papers, smuggled under a pecan pie, then hires Nora Fanshaw (Larua Dern) as her attorney, a bulldog lawyer who approaches divorce in a “there will be blood” crusade. Nora relishes in threatening Charlie with loss of all earthly possessions and any hint of custody. Charlie is forced to retaliate. Enter divorce Death Star Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta). At this point we strap in for a gut-wrenching saga of two legal vipers squaring off to pound the other side to pulp, not caring a whit that “sides” are flesh and blood people, parents at a starting line of good intentions. Charlie and Nicole recoil, shatterIng under scathing legal posturing and purposeful courtroom annihilation. Even Henry is a won/lost tally at times, the wretched center flag of a parental tug-of-war, Charlie pulling one arm, Nicole the other. Everyone is expendable as collateral damage, Charlie literally bleeding out on his rented California apartment floor in one grueling black humor kitchen scene. Lord, have mercy.
What materializes below the waves of the legal hurricane are two decent people, Charlie and Nicole, trying—mostly futilely—but trying nevertheless to resist succumbing to emotional cruelty. Predictably, tirades of fury and fear simmer, seethe and eventually explode. Human combustion. As the vitriol flies, you regret on their behalf what they’re unleashing— hateful, damning words that can never be taken back, that will echo forever no matter how hard they may wish differently. We’ve all been there. The film taps our jagged relational regrets, remorse and repentance, making “I’m sorry,” a communal mantra of misery. You want to jump up and shout at the screen, “Stop! Don’t say it! Just stop, please.”
Adam Driver is not a favorite of mine, he’s so Keanu Reeves with a distinctive monotone delivery, but he did stretch his dramatic persona for this role, perhaps his best performance to date. Petty question #1: how did 6’2” Driver gets cast with 5’3” Scarlett Johansson? He towered over her. Maybe it was to serve as a visual metaphor for their professional director/actress relationship. Truthfully, Johansson failed to win me over, I never warmed up to Nicole. I was rooting for Charlie, put off by Nicole and annoyed by Henry. Petty question #2: isn’t Henry way too big for a car seat? Cassie, Nicole’s witty sister, was my favorite of all the characters. For the record I am a total Merritt Wever groupie, my enthusiasm for her in Nurse Jackie morphed to sheer hero worship in Netflix’s Godless, the last scene I can watch over and over and over until I’m the last person awake in the household.
There were enough funny exchanges in this film, comedy infusion, that thankfully lightened the heavy laden angst. While the attorneys square off, family members rise and fall in their humanness. It’s like taking a selfie of our worst selves against a background of laughter, kindness, and thoughtfulness. If the goal is to showcase the competing dualism of the human spirit then Marriage Story charges ahead of the 2019 drama pack. It didn’t win my vote but maybe because it hit too close to home, taking me on a walk down memory lane of my own awful, demolition derby divorce, fomented by two condescending attorneys who pitted us against each other in a hostile custody battle over our two young sons. 35 years later I still hate the shameful things I said and did. Marriage Story’s “Join the crowd” is small comfort. I’ll leave it at that. The 77th Golden Globe Awards will be held aired live January 5, 2020 by NBC, 8 EST/5 PST.
