"I want..., an entirely different kind of life."

Rating: 8/10 (24 January 2020)

This is a tough movie to watch if you've been divorced or are thinking about it. And even if you're happily married for that matter. At the same time, the story seems realistic enough that you could picture two people going through this experience with all of it's emotional highs and lows. As a couple, I couldn't actually relate to Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver as characters married to each other. Driver in particular doesn't strike me as the leading man type, but that might have been for the better as the reasons they got married in the first place were eloquently spelled out in the pair's individual letters to each other. My first instinct about Nicole Barber (Johansson) was that she was entirely non-cooperative with the marriage counselor who was trying to help them understand why they fell in love with each other. Writing out their feelings seemed like a worthwhile project, but for Nicole not to share the information seemed quite unreasonable. As the story progresses however, we learn that the give and take in the marriage was pretty much one sided with Nicole doing all the giving, and Charlie (Driver) doing all the taking.
Enter the divorce attorneys and the situation takes on a grim aspect. Alan Alda's brief stint as Charlie's lawyer was quite comical actually; his unintentional (or maybe intentional) way of double talking was quite amusing and had a way of driving Charlie batty. The eventual sparring between Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern) and Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta) managed to negate the intended peaceful resolution to the divorce which had been premised by the Barbers when they first began thinking about it. As for that social worker (Martha Kelly) who called on Charlie and son Henry (Azhy Robertson), well, she looked like she could have used a good intervention herself.
The sad thing for the Barbers after the fact is that the marriage could probably have been saved had they allowed themselves the time and distance to come to terms with their situation. Instead, there was no happy ending here in the traditional sense, Nicole and Charlie each went their own way with no sense of fulfillment or closure for either one of them. I could have done without that theatrically inspired ending with Charlie singing to his friends at the bar back in New York. It wasn't particularly entertaining, and if you noticed, no one clapped their approval. Which is kind of the way the story leaves you feeling as a whole.