"Marriage Story" is mostly a tonally imbalanced fake-out.

Rating: 4/10 (11 December 2019)

I was repeatedly embarrassed while watching Marriage Story.
The wild tonal shifts (the consistent insistence on sitcom-level farce/borderline slapstick - perhaps especially pre-serving the papers) repeatedly derailed my ability to take anything or anyone seriously. The theatre troupe scenes were terrible ("A four-time Oscar-winner was sucking my-" why is this sequence/character in this film?). The abundance of overwritten monologuing. The cloying and contrived reappearance of the letter. Nicole's (Scarlett Johansson, who overall fares better than Driver) big "It's a game I'm playing with myself!" moment at the poolside. Their *big fight* (which made me snicker with how phony and forced it was, then appalled by the pseudo-disturbing revelation from Driver). Ordering his lunch for him at the lawyers' meeting, then tying his shoe for him. Pukey, honestly.
I'm shocked by the film, and the almost universally positive reactions, especially as this is from the same artist who made one of the great films about an ugly divorce: The Squid and the Whale.
There are moments and sequences that work, and even work very well, and some of the acting has special moments of high quality work (from Laura Dern and Alan Alda, especially), but the film as a whole doesn't work at all. I was especially stricken by a scene from the film's shamelessly manipulative second half, as it seems to best reflect a repeated problem with several sequences. It comes when Charlie (Adam Driver) gets up to sing Sondheim's "Being Alive" in front of his troupe, then goes to sit down after some awkwardness and mild friendly praise, but then inexplicably stands again and sings more - the rest of the song, in fact - and the film wants so desperately for this sequence to be telling and revelatory, and yet it moves from what starts to approach camp before stumbling into a desperate reach for his character's (clunky) pained lament(s). It's painful, yes, but not as intended, I'm afraid.
No one felt like a real person to me. No one talks like these characters talk.
The biggest cinematic surprise of the year for me was just how silly this turned out to be.
Grade: C-