Bland. Arrogant. Emotionally Immature.

Rating: 2/10 (6 January 2020)

I hated this movie. I wanted to review it right after seeing it, but thought I should cool down a bit so I don't come off as simply ranting. It's two weeks later. I haven't cooled down yet. This is a bit of a rant.
I definitely don't have the marriage experience under my belt to fully empathize with every situation in the film so there's a bit of distance for me there I suppose. That being said, I absolutely love Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage which this film is clearly trying to emulate. In that film, both characters have a believable mix of logic/irrationality in their approach to life in general and specifically their marriage and subsequent divorce and their conflicts are built on true, possibly irreconcilable character differences that have been established instead of random off screen past events or, as is more often the case, nothing. And in Scenes from a Marriage, the audience sees them first as a team in a seemingly very good relationship so when things start to go south they never stop hoping they'll work out in the end. In Marriage Story, I found it hard to care about a failing relationship that I was never invested in to begin with. Also, the story was clearly going for a realistic (maybe gritty is the word) look at marriage and human interaction, and yet every single side character was a, "how can I be as quirky as possible with my dialogue?" excuse from the babysitter saying "You two are so attractive!" to the social worker being a mute psychopath to all the theater company people being parodies of "actor-types" (what a waste of Wallace Shawn). Even the main side characters like Laura Dern and Ray Liotta felt like reductionist portrayals of their types of characters. Johansson's character starts out as a convincing, real-feeling character, but after her "my husband is great and I'm a dummy" speech to Laura Dern at the 30 minute mark, her actions become vague and inexplicable and the audience doesn't even get to see her that much. Then she practically becomes the Darth Vader to Laura Dern's Emperor, acting as a proxy antagonist for the entire film as she weaves a web of financial and time inconvenience for our poor poor hero Driver. Her arc felt like a bro-dude at a bar trying to convince his friend that his ex-wife is a itch instead of an honest attempt to craft a character. At the very worst Johansson is intentionally mean, vain, and practically evil. At best she's portrayed as stupid, getting strung along by Dern and only the heroic Driver can see through that. Also Dern's monologue about feminism was nothing that anyone on earth would ever say, it was staggeringly out of place and contrived. And also she bases the entire argument around the "Judeo-Christian concept of motherhood" because of The Bible's portrayal of Mother Mary. Too bad the word she was looking for was probably "Puritanical" or just "christian" since Judaism doesn't give a rats behind about Mary. The beginning of the film practically announces that it will be an even, fair portrayal of two peoples' sides of a divorce via the similar-in-length letter reading, but then Driver becomes the obvious protagonist and the only person who makes even a scrap of sense. And the whole LA vs NY side theme(?) was so shoe-horned and over done, it felt truly childish and the film never even attempts to explore either city as most of it takes place in ugly rooms in a sound stage that could have been shot anywhere. Every time they say "Let's go to (insert LA location here) they end up going to Pasadena. Every part of LA leads to a space-time portal to gosh dang Pasadena in this movie, they didn't even attempt to get the layout right. And also the entire approach to the film seemed to be "Let's show divorce from only the scrappy, nitty-gritty legal side," which is conceptually interesting, but then they spend so much time with meandering pointless arguments (which is "realistic" I suppose) and then don't even show the final court scene. Maybe I'm a terrible person, but I actually cried laughing at the "every day I wake up and I hope you're dead" line, I had to pause the movie and rewatch it like five times. They were acting SO HARD.
Me cutting down Bombach is less important to how I feel about the movie in general, but the fact that this is based off his own divorce is disturbing. It's hilarious that he divorced Jennifer Jason Leigh who was extremely successful at the time of their divorce, but he portrayed her character as being a loser actress who's only famous because of his work and is in crummy TV shows. On top of that he gave himself a MacArthur genius grant (something his sister has but he does not) which is once again, hilarious. Truly arrogant. And that's another thing, Bombach could not possibly have chosen less relatable characters. A wealthy MacArthur grant arthouse play director and his theatrical partner/TV actress wife. Ah yes, characters for the every-man indeed. And then to bar you further from empathizing with them, he clearly doesn't even understand what being an arthouse theater director would entail and only chose that role because he thought "hmm I can't make it TOO on the nose so he can't be a film director...he's a play director!" Ta-dah! The only thing we see him do is make one joke direction, "do it laying down, but also standing," or something quirky like that, and then choosing between two types of stools while he's on the phone. Two...types...of...stools. Two. In Western cinema, cheating on someone has been a standard unforgivable sin since its inception and at the very least something that needs to be directly dealt with and discussed. I have never seen a movie that downplayed infidelity so much, Bombach totally cheated on his wife and was like "lol what's the big deal?" and then portrayed it as such. And he didn't even care about the woman he had an affair with, he ignores her through the whole movie and she's portrayed as slightly unattractive which I think in some twisted way is supposed to make that even more OK. Driver's character tries to justify it by reminding Johansson that she didn't have sex with him for a year, a detail I never would have guessed, was never indicated anywhere early in the film, and I totally don't care about. So many of those arguments are just "emotional exposition," characters saying deep, hurtful crap that is nowhere in the film and could have been pulled from any breakup movie. I hear the pain in the actor's voices (they're trying so hard), but I didn't see a scrap of it on screen. Also, Bombach's divorce happened in the 90s, but this movie is set in modern times and the time-stamp discrepancies are so funny. How does Johansson find out about the divorce? "I saw the emails!" No one has coordinated a salacious rendezvous via email probably since Bombach went babe hunting on AOL. And they use the kid as a sort of emotional scapegoat, trying to make Driver's character more empathetic by making it seem like he's being such a whiny bum because he loves his kid so much and doesn't want the divorce to hurt the kid, but the kid is practically a lifeless doll. He has no personality and is obviously supposed to be younger than the actor that was cast. Seeing Driver and Johansson struggle to pick up this 100 pound paperweight and act like it's a sweet four year old cherub was one of the great joys of the film. It's like Bombach is an alien who understands that kids=empathy, but doesn't give a damn about his own child enough to portray him with even an ounce of believable personality or emotional stakes (I've never seen a kid, especially that age, give less of a crap about his parents' divorce). And HOLY MOLY, so many on the nose shots that I would have thought myself a genius for coming up with during freshman year of film school and then looked back at my own work a mere month later with unholy shame such as Johansson and Driver slowly closing the big wooden gate together while standing on separate sides of it. Once again, if you want to portray a realistic version of a divorce, you can't smash me over the head with a visual metaphor that weighs more than the empire state building (or the Chinese Theater. Which is better? LA vs NY! Oooo! Art!). And the shot of them all in the bed together filmed so their faces overlap. We get it, you saw Fanny and Alexander. Bombach thinks that mirroring Bergman's cinematography will somehow yield the same results for him, but Bergman's technical approaches to filmmaking is only a means to end in service of creating characters that feel absolutely real, something Bombach knows nothing about.