Domestic Blisters

Rating: 6/10 (5 January 2020)

Charlie Barber (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson looks like they have reached the end of the line in the marriage department. More a question of growing apart than exerting cruelty upon one another she moves to LA to do a series while Charlie a theatre director remains in NY. What remains important is access to their son and the semi-amicable break-up gets ugly when it gets litigious.
Marriage Story is a high gloss soap opera in the tradition of Kramer versus Kramer featuring fine performances from Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansen as the marital combatants. The split is not due to unbridled hatred for each other but lack of communication in which there is more frustration than rage. Writer director Noah Bombach's real villains in the piece are the down and dirty lawyers (played with relish by Laura Dern and Ray Liotta) and the divorce laws that can bankrupt both financially and morally a family.
Driver and Johansen display an excellent discordant chemistry with each other amid sterile settings that Baumbach applies some subtle incidentals to but the argumentation eventually grows repetitive with some moments contrived, others rushed and sloppy such as the one in which Charlie is being served. Piling on the suds Randy Newman contributes a score of heart tugging strings and woodwinds that give the impression you are watching a Hallmark Channel film with four letter words. Outside of the lead performances an overlong, banal coast to coast melodrama that goes in circles.