Straw Man Story

Rating: 2/10 (6 June 2020)

This movie is so contrived & false that it's infuriating. Why did they put themselves & their child through all this? Because of some flimsy stubborn competitiveness established in the beginning? I'm not buying it. And even so, that just makes me loathe these characters. It even goes so far as to lay on a disingenuous feminist element that is completely off base & laughable for no other reason I can imagine than that Baumbach wanted pander to the current political climate. Laura Dern's spiel on women's disadvantages in society do not apply to the court system when deliberating custody. Conversely, it's the man rather who's dealt the disadvantage in this case(Driver even had to pay for a third of Scarlett's legal costs!). The woman is favored in such a circumstance for a reason the Liotta character explicitly brought up earlier on in the film. So, now the film contradicts itself too...
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I can 't speak for others(clearly to some out there there's resonance here), but as a child who has virtually known divorce all his life, who cannot even remember when his parents were ever together, I could not get over how phony this all felt. As a human being I could not get over how infuriating this all felt(& not the way it was intended). Unfortunately, not even the acting could redeem it for me in any way. In fact, the acting was so good at times that my disgust for the characters would momentarily slip off onto the actors. I found this to be just a bunch of noise & emotions around nothing, wherein they waste their money & potential on divorce proceedings that neither one of them wanted, but sustained anyways out of a sick power game; meanwhile, the world's got real problems going on...In other words, there is no real problem here. Just middle-upper class, self-indulgent, first-world idiots with maniacal egos stirring one up & then acting like nothing happened because Driver needs his shoe tied...
If Baumbach needs a solid story to film he should consider reading some novels & optioning something because clearly he is just forcing something here out of what may be a drought of anything more substantial to say. It's a movie about people who have the resources to be relatively happy, but who create a problem for themselves & come out the other end with nothing--like nothing at all had happened. It's empty. Nobody likes a straw man argument. Well, ladies & gentleman, this is nothing more than a straw man story...