Mediocre Marriage Story

Rating: 6/10 (9 February 2020)

This is a pretty mediocre movie about a less than interesting divorce. As is often the case when the director is also the writer, this movie suffers from a weak script and a dearth of strong tweaking. For a film about marriage - or is it about divorce - Marriage Story has little to say and offers little insight into marriages or troubled relationships. Scenes play out as if it is fascinating for the director watching behind the camera, but for the audience many scenes just seem to go on too long, or peter out, or need to be pumped up. Surely the biggest problem with the movie is that the motivation for this particular 'drama' is unclear. Here we have a youngish couple with a child, both with careers in the same business, who seem to be at a crisis in their marriage. But how we got there and the magnitude of that crisis is unclear and remains vague throughout the film. We see one stab at counselling and then bang it's off to melodrama-movie-style-divorce. For all the naturalness that is attempted here the behaviour and situations these folks find themselves in - and their subsequent behaviours - seem quite fake and unreal. Again this problem is due to a contrived script. The child custody element of this story (shades of Kramer v.s. Kramer) also doesn't work very well because at the heart of it is an immature, spoiled, selfish, neurotic and irritating child who seriously needs a firm hand and a haircut. And whereas the actors seem game, the scenes with the child actor feel stiff and constrained. The adult actors do a great job from Ray Liotta and Laura Dern and Alan Alda as the lawyers to Adam Driver as the husband. But Marriage Story really belongs to Scarlett Johansson who yells, laughs, cries, wipes away tears and basically owns this movie what there is of it.