Should've Been Called "Divorce Story"

Rating: 6/10 (15 December 2019)

Adam Driver is an off-Broadway director who has just won a MacArthur Grant. Scarlett Johansson is the leading player of his company. Their marriage is falling to pieces. She has just gotten a TV pilot, so she's off to California with their son. They've agreed to an amicable divorce, but she gets a lawyer in California, so he gets a lawyer in California, and things go straight to heck.
Hitchcock said "The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." Netflix has set that at naught. Once upon a time, you saw a movie in a theater, and you didn't want to duck out on a feature, so you headed for the facilities while the James Fitzpatrick Traveltalk was on. Later, you might see it on television, where the presence of "station identifications" served as features rather than bugs. Now we have the ability to not only watch from the comfort of our homes, but to stop and start the movie at our pleasure. You can watch this movie's 136 minutes -- that's the length of a season of a British series -- in little more than two hours, or stretch it to over whatever time you wish. Go, take a bath, read WAR AND PEACE, take a trip around the world, these poor characters will be waiting to suffer for your pleasure whenever you like.
Is that even a movie as we understand the word? With the constraint of time removed, there's no need to limit the length of the...show. Nor was there much evidence that the film makers had. The leads are brilliant performers; they indulge in long, one-shot monologues, they inhabit their characters, it's a brilliant supporting cast, the leads each sing a song from Sondheim's COMPANY, and by the end of it, it seemed to have gone on as long as my 18-month divorce had. As soon as I left the theater, I began to trim the movie in my own mind, and soon had taken half an hour from it without losing anything from the story. True, you wouldn't hear Miss Johanssen, Julie Hagerty and Merritt Wever sing "You Could Drive A Person Crazy" in my version, showing the enormous range and ability necessary to winning awards. But you could go on a date, eat a meal, see the movie, and get home in time to get to work the next morning.
Oh, concessions could have been made. An intermission could have been put in. It wasn't, because it was never made with that in mind. So, no, I don't think it's a movie, even if I did see it in a movie theater.
Was it good? As someone who went through a bad divorce, it was too raw for me.