A Love Story About Divorce

Rating: 9/10 (11 February 2020)

I think the first film I remember crying at was Kramer v Kramer; I don't know how old I was, but I remember being in the same room as it when the TV was showing it one Christmas. I don't think I fully understood it - but I know what stayed with me so powerfully was the way I sensed it articulating something of my own fear of my own parents splitting up. Not that I ever had any reason to think that would happen - it didn't. But I remember the fear.
Many years and 20 years of my own marriage later, Marriage Story doesn't evoke the same fear, but it does evoke both a kind of sadness as to the way it portrays what so many go through, a kind of recognition of the sort of slow escalations that all of us experience in almost any sort of relationship. It's the simple - yet complex - story of a couple's marriage in breakdown ... they start in couple's counselling and ends in divorce, following the negotiation of the details along the way.
It seems odd to cast the film among the performance industry - he is a theatre director, she an actress; at times that's in danger of tipping the film into the sort of conflicts most of us don't have to deal with, but in the end there's enough truth there to make this feel like an 'everyman' sort of relationship.
The whole film hints occasionally at the heightened realities of musicals - the framing, the tight close-ups and tracking shots following the long speeches of one or the other, maybe even the colour palette at times suggesting the 1950s/60s musicals golden era. When Adam Driver's character, near the film's end, sings a Sondheim song in a bar, that sense is bought closer to the heart; like musicals, the film is unashamed in trying to move us and does so.
Much of this is quite remarkable - Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are outstanding, both of them simultaneously sympathetic and repellant, highlighting the reality that the film doesn't force us to choose one side or the other; or if it does, the way we jump is down to our own biased, not the film's. The film's standout moment, an argument that starts amicably and ends in words that can't be unsaid, is the sort of sequence you feel as if you're privy to someone else's private pain, laundry that should only aired in private hung out for all to see. It's remarkable in performance, direction and writing - and everything else besides.
The film also mines comedy out of some of the most painful situations; the moment Adam Driver's character is served with divorce papers is almost farce-like in its execution, yet the tonal shift within the scene never jars. Much within the film is funny, because people are funny; there's always a hint of joy, even in the midst of great pain.
This, I think, is where the hope in the film comes from; given where we are almost certain the film will end right from the first scene, the light touches of humour and the moments of clarity amidst the recriminations, claims and counterclaims point us to the human capacity to be better versions of ourselves even when so much seems to be falling around us. Like the best films, it's never one thing entirely - it's a love story about a divorce, a drama with very good jokes and comedic scenes, a musical with only one song. It's a film about one particular relationship, that allows us to see every relationship (not just marital ones) in a fresh light.