A cautionary tale for men thinking about marriage

Rating: 7/10 (20 January 2020)

This was hard to watch-- depressing and frankly the sort of scary that's so real and implacable it makes you queasy. For the most part, I'd rather not watch movies like this. But my wife popped it on and I didn't want to stop watching the trainwreck as it unfolded on the screen in front of me.
Only a few people caught what I did (or everyone is just being polite and "not going there"): Adam Driver's character, Charlie, gets savaged by his outgoing wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), at least at first. Spoiler: works out relatively peacefully at the end. But only after Nicole makes a stunning show of force to Charlie via the support conferred upon her and all women by the state: she makes it crystal clear to Charlie, and to all us stupid, bad men, by extension, that we but serve at the Queen's pleasure, however petty, brutal, changeable, and self-referential her rule may be. Thankfully, Charlie was not bankrupted, destroyed as a person, or permanently deprived of his child but only because Nicole lacks, constitutionally, the fortitude to follow through on ANY life choice, be it marriage, lifelong career aspirations, or divorce. In other words, if Nicole hadn't been such a shameless coward, the second half of "Marriage Story" would only have detailed Charlie's abject evisceration on the floor of a family court room, with even his son cheering his annihilation. He wouldn't have been able to stop her.
The few reviewers who saw this dimension of the story expressed the view that the filmmakers must have wanted the audience to sympathize with Nicole and not Charlie. I disagree. I suspect the filmmakers rather sided with Charlie in terms of his much greater legal vulnerability compared to Nicole's. Why else belabor the point? Of course, we want the narrative to strongly denounce its villains, but that is not possible here, not in our thoroughly gynocentric world. The point had to be made in a subtle and understated way to make it to the big screen. That doesn't make it any less painful to watch, but hopefully some younger men who may be considering marriage will watch this movie and heed its implicit warnings about the overwhelming social and legal power of women in our social order. Charlie felt he was treated like a criminal and all it took was his wife basically calling him one. If you have ears to hear, then listen...
In short, hard to watch and very sad, but a good reminder for those of us married men who have already red-pilled to remember the risk we accepted when we married and, perhaps optimistically, a strong hint to single men to be aware of the shadow side of married life and their relationships with women in general that society tends to hide from them.