Rich people get slightly less rich

Rating: 1/10 (7 December 2019)

Terrible. It fools us in the beauty of its film stock. Baumbach always comes at us overwriting concepts into these mild tortures of the mind, he's like a malicious Woody Allen. but Woody had that filter of comedy-as failing in stand-up meant it's useless unless it connects. Plus he was informed. Baumbach wants it all ways on the merit of his brand, which is suspect to begin with. His scripts are always grating the more they talk. Its frame of self-reference through theater productions is a great thought, and we're offered the range of abstract bizarro theater to mindless sitcoms... of course! His condescension is infinite and goes in all directions. Artistic sincerity doesn't exist for him since he's still in this satiric auteur reality where authenticity is merely a gimmick, another abstraction of the intellect. Another clue is the theater players themselves, other'd as simpletons or fools for comic relief. Almost everyone is NPC'd. This is not wicked, but narcissistic. It's not that it isn't relatable, the breakups are the most real and painful experiences we have. It's that we can tell the lie. Scarlett rings false. She has already been a cyborg, an alien, a mutant, I was waiting for the moment she peeled her skin off in those uncomfortable closeups that seemed to want to demystify her on film. Driver rings false as her husband, as he seems to work not by his appearance so is wasted on film, but by his enveloping bro-ness. Too boyish to be so fatherly let alone a genius director. This is the least credible couple I can recall. Then all the ways it's out of touch. Remember they hand Scarlett a writing job out of nowhere and she thinks on it within two seconds, says, 'Sounds good but can I be director too?' and they go, 'Sure!' ...is that how it worked for you, Noah? Like what is this elitist reality they're pretending is ours? $650,000 grant? Sitcom royalties? LA v NY? Every review says Kramer vs Kramer, and that is doing this zero favors. Back then you could not fake integration. Word of mouth was not decided by algorithms. Today, Baumbach he's a rich kid wearing this as a coat, the film is not human but a tantrum with a blank check from netflix to do that thing that won all the awards. Its humanity is corporate manipulation for conquering all the other streaming services. And I know this is a low-blow, but I was psyched for it. "Women are expected to be perfect." The film is not neutral, it's about her actualization, even so much as she ends up a better director than him as he's forced into some kind of director jail. So it concedes his selfishness all along with his compromise, saying, he had all the fun. Scarlett's Story. "Now I get what you were obsessed about." For this battle-ground of the theater it offers her the ultimate prize of the Emmy nom, like it's Baumbach externalizing his deeply guilty conscience, maybe his privilege. But he sings, so takes some larger moral victory in taking the loss. "You're the first person I talked to who treated me like a human" "It's because you remind me of myself". Cynicism goes in every direction, everyone is other'd. But the film is review-proof, it works in the poster more than anything. It's in the title: "Marriage Story". It can't not work. It's universal, but it really tries, then it leans on cliches, nasty lawyers, comic visitations, there it works, it hangs on those for dear life.