Phone rings, door chimes... in comes Company!

Rating: 7/10 (19 January 2020)

Maybe it's the relative dearth of movies about real people and real life that has critics and amateur reviewers falling over themselves in praise of Marriage Story. Maybe it's the sheer novelty of being drawn into a story that unfolds on a human scale, without magical powers, cataclysmic action and layers of CGI. Or maybe there's just something about this movies' attempt at a raw and visceral examination of divorce that has pushed buttons on both sides of the gender divide. Marriage Story certainly deserves praise for all those things, even if it doesn't deserve maximum stars and unqualified acclaim. The film's main virtues are the central performances. Driver and Johansson are strong enough to make you care (or almost care) about two not overly likeable characters, and they're real enough to (again, almost) overcome some of the more contrived aspects of the story, dialogue and direction. Even more so, Laura Dern and Alan Alda embody the best, but mostly the worst of the legal system, playing wildly different divorce lawyers - from well-meaning but ineffectual (Alda) to malevolent and toxic (Dern). If there's one aspect of Marriage Story that's truly great, it's the way it totally skewers the legal profession. Aside from that, it's a rather patchy affair. Obviously an acrimonious divorce calls for a flawed couple and some entrenched, unreasonable viewpoints. Even so, it becomes increasingly hard to buy some aspects of the irretrievable differences on show here. Charlie goes on believing that he and Nicole still live in New York, long, long after it is abundantly clear that this isn't the case. And Nicole is just too easily swayed by her rottweiler of a lawyer for us to believe that she's anywhere near as well-intentioned as we're supposed to think she is. The final showdown between the estranged couple - and the big acting tour de force for both leads - is both tortuously contrived and clumsily written. It takes everything Driver and Johansson have to (almost) make it fly. Thereafter Marriage Story becomes quite nauseatingly mawkish and sentimental, so much so that it's almost like another director has been brought in for re-shoots. The lowest point is an extended Sondheim homage that starts with Nicole and her mother and sister in a weirdly slapdash performance of You Could Drive A Person Crazy (they're all playing professional actors, so one has to wonder why it's so bad) and ends with Charlie giving an impromptu and supposedly gut-wrenching piano bar performance of Being Alive (both songs from Sondheim's Company, a show about marriage). It's hard to feel anything other than befuddled when a movie that has spent two hours trying to convince you that it's virtually a docudrama suddenly bursts into song. But if you can, the only conclusion is that Noah Baumbach has failed to come up with any original conclusions about the pros and cons of marriage, and has instead resorted to quoting Stephen Sondheim. And he's not necessarily wrong - there's as much wisdom in those three minutes of Being Alive as there is in the other two hours and twenty minutes of Marriage Story. So, to summarise what Baumbach seems to be saying: divorce is hell, divorce lawyers are evil, nobody really deserves either, but if you're looking for a take on marriage that is both profound and uplifting you should probably get a DVD of Sondheim's Company.