Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (7 December 2019)

Can you make, in this day and age, a movie about a man and a woman and nothing else? Can you present the old battle between Los Angeles and New York in a new light and a have a 'neurotic' auteur male protagonist with his blonde muse appear fresh, more than 40 years after Woody Allen (and his master, Bergman)?
Can you drawn out for well more than two hours what in the end is just a dramatic comedy (the only flaw I would ascribe to an otherwise unmitigated triumph) and not only get away with it but pull from under your hat a career defining masterpiece not just for you but for your two leading actors (hell, three if we count Ray Liotta, and I'm gonna! I'd consider even Alan Alda to have been blessed by this movie if his career wasn't already legendary, although, besides Horace and Pete, this may be his only work really worthy of notice in the last 20 years)?
Well, turns out if your name is Baumbach you can do whatever the hell you want, and then some!
I've long appreciated this underknown master crafter of movies, although his last collaboration with Ben Stiller (and adam driver, who i only got to like in this movie!) left me somewhat cold. But it appears that since he took the Netflix way, UNLIKE some better known big shot director, he is regaling us with his best work since The squid and the whale, well into his fifties (I imagine...).
Aside from a couple of 'musical' numbers that seemed a concession to his stars and aggravated the already vexing screen time, the only other small blemish I could find in an otherwise perfect script would be that, despite a very conscious effort to present a very balanced, UN-kramer like scenario, in which both the man and the woman are very good parents and essentially good people who only want the best for each other, but still, against their better judgement, end up making each other miserable, the movie still seems to me to favor the woman in the end, if only slightly (55-45 let's say).
That may also be the reason why Scarlett Johansson is generally considered to have given the best performance, even though it seems to me the most dramatic scenes were given to Driver. That may also have to do with something cognitivists call the frame problem: while Adam Driver has almost esclusively appeared in artsy dramas, Johansson can be considered a somewhat bogged down version of the very character she plays, an actress known for a commercial movie in which she shows her boobs.
Funnily enough, the only nude the real Scarlett ever did was in an artsy scandinavian film that nobody saw (aside from the salient ten seconds...), but aside from that she may have given the best actorial proof in her career just because she never challenged herself all that much, not because she suddenly channeled Liv Ullman like many seem to think.
Driver, on the other hand, doesn't do here anything he hadn't already done in the past, beside being likable (no small feat for him! kudos to Baumbach once more).
All the rest of the cast is in a state of grace as well, from Laura Dern to the already mentioned Ray Liotta and Alan Alda as the combative lawyers of the protagonists. I may have chosen famous names for other roles as well, namely Nicole's mother and sister, instead of casting Wallace Shawn in a pretty forgettable and useless character.