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There’s something of a tone problem with Marriage Story. Occupying a space that is nominally within raw melodrama, Marriage Story details a he said/she said back-and-forth that occasionally wanders into quirky comedy territory. It does eventually stick the landing but getting to that complicated ending point takes quite a bit of work.
Noah Baumbach is clearly pulling from his own life with the painful earnestness of the emotional revelations and excoriating fights. None of that is meant in a negative critical way, despite what the word choice may imply. Rather, I mean it as a hallelujah-like affirmation. There’s a keen emotional intelligence and revealing spiritual cost at the center of this relationship.
We begin with a montage and voiceover as Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) detail what initially attracted and brought them together as a couple. We are setting up the paradise while it is in the midst of being lost. We eventually learn that this idyllic portrait is being recalled during a therapy session as the couple bristles at each other, but in that polite way that longtime companions will do when they don’t want to scorch the earth.
Not yet anyway as much of Marriage Story details how the conscious uncoupling at the beginning is about to get blown to smithereens. The twin storylines involve Nicole reclaiming her voice and power after dimming them both in deference to Charlie, and Charlie realizing how controlling and domineering his ego is. There’s also plenty about the human cost of a long-term relationship dissolving, especially when that relationship extends beyond the romantic and into business.
That Zen-like separation only lasts so long before Nicole lawyers up. Notably with a barracuda named Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), a fictional proxy for Laura Wasser, Hollywood’s preeminent divorce lawyer. Soon Charlie is meeting with a smart if amiable lawyer (Alan Alda) and a far more aggressive type (Ray Liotta). The eventual verbal gunfight between Dern and Liotta in court is an expertly written and performed scene demonstrating where, how, and why good intentions in divorce can go so far astray and quickly turn nearly nuclear in their toxicity.
However, all this honesty and raw feeling is offset by divergences into strange comedic detours. A visit from a court-appointed social worker feels like it wandered in from an entirely different movie. One that is arch and performative in contrast to this one’s lived-in authenticity. Same goes for an extended musical sequence where Charlie sings “Being Alive” from Company. It feels like a glimpse of a movie Driver and Baumbach are dying to make and not something that feels necessary to this story.
It helps that guiding through all these narrative twists are an ensemble of incredibly talented actors giving lived in performances. Driver and Johansson must immediately create a believable history as a couple before promptly imploding it and asking for our sympathies and understanding. Alda is stellar as the genteel attorney while Liotta is masculine aggrandizement writ large. Dern recalls Rosalind Russell’s working women at their steeliest. What a series of great performances that breathe life into strong material. For all its narrative stumbles, Marriage Story’s human story is worth the journey.
