Cinema as Theatre; Theatre as Life

Rating: 7/10 (10 December 2019)

There are a couple potential problems with making such semi-autobiographical, personal pictures as Noah Baumbach does. One, you probably either need to relate to or be intrigued by the familial squabbling of such middle-to-upper-class New York artists and intellectuals, pretentious or otherwise. Having seen a few of his movies now, from one Baumbach episode to the next, I've found that it gets tiresome fast. Second and encompassing the first hindrance is the underlying philosophy of art as simply being a reflection of one's life. An obvious antecedent for this writer-director is Woody Allen, but say what you will about Allen, artistically his oeuvre isn't that rudimentary. Consequently, perhaps, there's no substantial distinction made in Baumbach's outlook between cinema and theatre (that is, besides the either hypocritical or self-deprecating snootiness within the movie)--both are for Baumbach to play life on a stage, including this second installment, after "The Squid and the Whale" (2005), in his intimately cathartic stories of divorce. "Marriage Story" is likely his best picture yet, though, because of how it integrates storytelling in life, plays and movies. While the actual story here is about divorce, the structure is about the union of those three stages of narratives; it's a marriage story, after all.
Indeed, as the couple's attorneys outline, their divorce battle is over the construction of the narrative. Are they a New York family or a Los Angeles one? Is the theme that he's a philanderer or that she's a lush, he a liar who trapped her in the Big Apple or she a felonious hacker who tricked him into allowing her an upperhand in the custody case over their son? In a relatively even-handed manner, the plot serves both narratives with a dual focus alternating between the perspective of the husband-father (Adam Driver) and that of the wife-mother (Scarlett Johansson). He begins as a director, casting her as the actress in his life, but her move to Hollywood includes her branching into directing, as well, both motion pictures and her life. Legally, meanwhile, the expensive lawyers form the couples' perspectives to be enacted, including on the courtroom stage.
While this divorce proceeds, these protagonists introduced as theatrical people, him a director and her an actress, are pulled from (off) Broadway to Hollywood. Aesthetically, there were already indications of this in their ridiculous-looking play, as it included recorded moving images of her beside the actress in the flesh. It's a multimedia performance, which in the larger scheme is a play-within-a-play and a movie-within-the-movie that we're watching. A brief search of Baumbach's biography will suffice to point out the obvious parallels here with his life. Like the male lead, he married an actress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) whose big break in Hollywood was a role in a raunchy teen comedy ("Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982)). Both couples, then, had a child and divorced. Baumbach similarly fictionalized his parents' breakup in "The Squid and the Whale."
Unfortunately, however, it's not cinema and theatre that divorce in the picture. For the most part, the acting and writing are engaging enough, but some of the blocking and monologues are as conspicuously stagy as Johansson being carried in the play-within-the-play. The long, steady framings and fades to black compound this. Driver's song at the end was ineffective for me because of its theatricality. Likewise, Johansson's first speech to her attorney, what with her walking around while pontificating, came off as especially affected (it works somewhat better when Alan Alda basically does the same thing later in his first scene with Driver). On the other hand, Laura Dern and Ray Liotta are impressive at getting to the point of the story when it's their turn to tell it. The fawning letters the protagonists write of each other that frames the movie's narrative overall is effective, as well. Regardless, it's not the story or the characters here that interest me, let alone how it reflects life and issues of divorce; it's the structure that matters. The case is built and won or lost based on who is directing and how the narrative is constructed.