A Marriage Story (if marriage is a contract and not a covenant)

Rating: 5/10 (25 February 2020)

The beginning of "Marriage Story" begins with a wholesome timelapse of the couple's daily lives narrated by one another reading a letter of adoration about their spouse. However, the film takes a jarring comedic twist when it's revealed to the viewer this is just the beginning of the couple's separation. This clever opening compelled me to believe the film would be more than promising, but the next two hours would only disappoint. "Marriage Story" is hardly about the ups and downs of a broken family, but rather, a spectacle of downs alone where the complexity of love and heartache aren't challenging each other.
For a couple that could within themselves choose to see the good in their partner despite all the reasons corroding their marriage, it's hard to believe they're the same couple for the remainder of the film. The pair, Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), are only ever able to overcome adversity scarcely when Nicole orders Charlie food and ties his shoe. This inability to rise above created very weak leads that coaxed distaste in the viewer for either one or both spouses. The two characters are overloaded with flaws that are grossly overlooked by their own judgement for the entire duration of the film, leaving them with only a single redeeming quality of wanting to do what's right (with not much motivation to do so). During their separation, neither experiences any genuine growth in their struggles outside of courtroom gain. Once the money and lawyers were out of the picture, the two are able to reconcile and be civil. Not because they worked on themselves, on the contrary, but because if they're not facing conflict that confronts their shortcomings, those shortcomings lie dormant until another issue arises. The film gives a false sense of growth, when in reality that growth was stumped by the characters' self-serving pride.
Despite being stagnant characters, Driver and Johansson have pivotal points of evoking emotion from the viewer, such as when the two have an argument in Charlie's new apartment and Charlie breaks down. Johanson plays a convincing mother and estranged wife and Driver truly embodies Charlie's emotions, making him seem more surreal, which made the film easier to digest. However, when Charlie sings "Being Alive" to seemingly vent his feelings in a format he best understands, it became less ingenuous. The longer the scene progressed, quickly it became more of a catalyst to fill the film's desire to be an artistic, Hollywood-esque film, such as La La Land. As for the divorce lawyers the film poked fun at, Alan Alda had by far one of the best deliveries in selling his role that outshined the more superficial portrayals by Laura Dern and Ray Liotta (which is largely due to their stifling characters).
Furthermore, the film hints at children being used as pawns in the courtroom, yet the film only allows room for Nicole and Charlie's child to become a convenient chest piece. Their child lacks depth or development, other than a "mommy's boy" attachment that causes a petty disparity between himself and his father. While Charlie and Nicole are trying to convince the viewer that their son comes first, they simultaneously are pushing for their own agendas without regard for their child, leaving their son neglected by both the couple and the script writer. For a character who is supposed to be so important to the parents, the character is treated as Waitress #2, and made ironically irrelevant to the story as a whole. Inadvertently, the boy becomes an accessory for the sake of the plot. Unfortunately, the poor development of his character made him quite unlikable, alongside his parent counterparts. In Charlie and Nicole's child, you'll find only the remnants of an idea rather than an individual, resulting in an unmemorable character whose name no one remembers (it's Henry). In this boy I see so many missed opportunities to explore the confusing pain of feeling divided between two people you love and the misguided guilt of driving them apart. In the end, you'll discover two parents who seem to care deeply and sacrificially for a child who's nothing more than a puppet who wishes he can be a boy.
Overall, the story wasn't strong. The characters danced around each other and had terrible communication just as the plot did with the viewer. "Marriage Story" is a sensualization of divorce written from a Hollywood-skewed perspective of marriage.