Scenes From a Broken Marriage ...

Rating: 9/10 (8 December 2019)

40 years after "Kramer vs. Kramer", here comes Noah Baumbach's "Marriage Story", a well-written, well-directed and certainly well-acted movie tackling the difficult subject of divorce and through it marriage, responsibility... and love. That the film is a major Oscar contender doesn't surprise me but I like what that critical acclaim reflects: a movie about divorce must obey to higher standards of filmmaking than any drama subgenre; many are masterpieces such as Farhadi's "Separation" or Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage".
The point of a divorce film isn't to take sides, you've got to show two persons with their strengths, flaws, the qualities they take for granted and weaknesses they don't suspect. The three-dimensionality you bring up to the characters and the way they interact through conflicts, tenderness or awkward moments have the challenging complexity of an emotional Rubik-cube game. A quote in "Marriage Story" says "crime lawyers see bad people at their best, divorce lawyers see good people at their worst" and that's the point: marriage movies insist on flaws that are only flipsides of qualities.
And so the film starts beautifully with two monologues from each of Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlet Johansson), describing what they like best in each other. The descriptions insist on so many details that it's impossible not to relate to both of them, I often brew tea I end up not drinking like Nicole and I'm a bad loser when it comes to games like Charlie. The opening monologues are exposition masterstrokes (with a twist at the end), allowing us to know about the couple, their roles as parents and their jobs: Charlie is a theater director who found a muse in Nicole, a previous TV star who abandoned her dreams for Charlie.
Together they had a child named Henry (a reference to Justin Henry who played Billy in "Kramer"?), the kid played by Azhy Robertson, is obviously the sinews of the war. Since Charlie lives and works in New York and Nicole stars in a TV show shot in L.A., much more they married in L.A. and it's Henry's birthplace, there's more at stakes than a matter of custody. Charlie wants Henry back to New York but Nicole's rising career is in L.A.. The battle opens with promises never to go to court but we know it's a matter of inevitability. The trick is that no one wants to accuse the other of bad parenting, nor to brag about being the better parent, it's all about saying what's best for the kid.
But can any parent be that objective when it comes to the child? Spending more time with his mother, Henry's bias leans in her direction while Charlie becomes the stranger who does his best to accommodate him. It takes someone who's gone through divorce to understand Charlie's situation. I see my own daughter twice every month during weekends and half the holidays, and whenever I see her I feel forced to satisfy her caprices, which is not the right way to educate, but since you're put in a situation where you want to live the moment to its fullest and not spoil it, you spoil your kid.
And when the kid behaves badly, you almost take it as an affront... and must endure people who pretend not to judge your parenting and you know they do. That's the paradox of divorce, you try to display the best parenting and yet it might be perceived as the worst like in that sequence where Charlie is being observed and does his best to avoid complications... that ultimately happen. Divorce complicates relationships and I'm glad a film could show it so remarkably, with brutality or humor.
I saw "Kramer" with my then-wife and she ended up (to my surprise) rooting with Ted while I kind of empathized with Joanna, especially her suffocation through marital commitment and wish to find herself. It's important not to make a conflict binary and this is why the "character study" is important, why we should understand someone's inner personalities. Charlie is an artist who's dedicated to his art in a disciplined manner, Nicole is a dreamer who needs to be her own master. Together they love each other but here's what I said about Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage":
"While loving someone is a genuine feeling, being married implies duties whose applications might interfere with our inner personalities. Whether it's sex life, success and dreams, they can be undermined by marital life. The danger is to start looking at the man or the woman of our life as the one who's sinking it into the abysses of routine and conventions."
That's how Nicole started to look at Charlie and vice versa, that's the way she describes him in a bravura speech where she tells her lawyer (a scene-stealing Laura Dern) how she feels about him, and a later moment where Charlie vents his anger on Nicole and culminates with a wish to see her die, before busting into tears. I love that he regained his composure and said "sorry" and that Nicole didn't even take it badly, it's for subtle moments like this that I think the film should take home a few golden boys. Driver has a raw natural magnetism and Johannson is given the most difficult role and both are perfect in acting naturally and also unnaturally. The best 'actors' being the lawyers.
As someone who went through these stages of bargains through love letters, these moments where we cry ourselves to sleep, anger when we blame the other for failing the marriage vows and we realize we won't see our children regularly, when we even miss the in-laws, the film is poignantly cathartic even in a resigned state.
And I mentioned the notion of "acting" in marriage, maybe the real act of fidelity in marriage is to be faithful to yourself in the first place. What Charlie and Nicole achieve at the end.