Hurt Too Deep: MARRIAGE STORY

Marriage Story starts at an ending. The couple has decided to divorce. Aside from warm flashback montages that open the film as a stream-of-consciousness exercise held in a marriage counselor’s office, we don’t see the good times. Or rather, we only glimpse what must’ve been good times reflected in bad times as we hear the parties puzzling over the fault lines in the relationship. As the divorce grows more fraught and contentious, formal negotiations and lawyers (Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, and Alan Alda as a trio of well-observed caricatures) drain the couple’s resources and their capacity for forgiveness. In order to convince themselves that the strife of splitting up is worth it in the end, they need to start telling themselves a marriage story that minimizes the good times. It’s a film of people drifting apart who, upon deciding to split, snowball down opposite sides of a hill, the distance between them rapidly widening as their differences start relatively small and grow irreconcilable. This is literalized when she moves to Los Angeles, leaving him in New York. The space between them becomes as insurmountable as their actual distance. When their lawyers talk to one another more than they do, any hopes of an easy, amicable split are gone for good.

There’s a pang of painful truth running through every scene of Noah Baumbach’s screenplay. (That some of the details align with his own divorce some years earlier lends it an added patina of extra-textual realism.) He brings the dilemma to life on screen with the relaxed ease of a graying master, an expert at dramatizing his clever, literary dialogue with a perfectly judged long-take or a sudden crushing tightness in a well-chosen cut into a close-up. The filmmaking here is warm and sharp, halfway between his elegant Meyerowitz Stories’ deeply-felt intergenerational dynamics and his bruising The Squid and the Whale’s emotionally penetrating divorce dysfunction. As the two halves of this film’s fractured marriage, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are compellingly complicated. They are painfully human, both capable of careless selfishness and achingly vulnerable empathy. The result is prickly scenes riding a razor’s edge, with clear care between the two of them even when twisting small slights into defining statements of purpose, or escalating a legitimate concern into an avoidable verbal collision. The film’s structure pulls the picture’s sympathies between the two of them — much like their young son is suddenly navigating two parental relationships instead of seeing them as a United whole. “He’s just telling you what he thinks you want to hear,” one says to the other, about their son’s desire to make his parents happy, even in this most stressful situation. But aren’t they all just telling themselves about the past in a way that’ll make their present choices go down easier? The real marriage story is the justification they need along the way.