An improvement

Rating: 6/10 (14 November 2019)

This is a lot better than Mr Baumbach's deadly 'The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)', over which it's better to draw a veil. There is another film lurking in the shadows, however: 'Kramer vs Kramer', of which 'Marriage Story' might be considered a kind of 30-years-have-gone-by update. The ambition and unselfconscious self-obsession of Adam Driver's character is shared by Dustin Hoffman's in the earlier film. But Scarlett Johansson's character is allowed not to feel as guilty as Meryl Streep's for believing that she could be a better mother if she could be a whole person. Baumbach gives Laura Dern, Ray Liotta and Alan Alda very good speeches as a trio of lawyers explaining how the courts will stitch the opposing parties up.
There are some funny lines and one really excellent scene in which the leads tear into each other, no holds barred. But it's Driver's raw delivery of a Sondheim song that will probably impress most.
I wish I'd've liked it more, but in the end the travails of those in Mr Baumbach's navel-gazing world are not perhaps as universal as he might like to think.