Marriage Story
I wouldn’t like to be Noah Baumbach. Yes, he’s nominated for two Oscars at the moment — one for writing his latest kitchen-island-sink drama, Marriage Story, and the other for producing it. (He also directed the movie, but has thankfully been spared the indignity of recognition in a category that’s instead opted to stroke the ego of Todd Phillips.) But he’s facing competition from the most daunting of colleagues: his mid-life partner, Greta Gerwig.
Granted, they aren’t facing off in the same category. (Gerwig adapted her screenplay for Little Women, whereas Baumbach did what he could with his own gifts.) Yet what if he were to win, and she were to lose? Or vice versa? One can only imagine what sort of squalls may brew in the couple’s New York brownstone, egged on by the early morning wails of their newborn son, Harold. (Where’s Ruth Gordon when you need her?) Don’t let Baumbach’s spindly, puppy-eyed tenor fool you: the quiet ones are always the most trouble.
Evidence: this movie. About ten minutes into Marriage Story, there’s a brief shot of a New York Times article profiling husband-and-wife theatrical team Charlie and Nicole Barber. (The fact that Mr. and Mrs. Barber resemble Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson is neither here nor there.) The article is titled, “Scenes from a Marriage” — an allusion to Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 film of the same name. No doubt Woody Allen, whose Husbands and Wives (‘92) was based upon Bergman’s movie — and whose entire oeuvre serves as an at least unconscious reference point for Mr. Baumbach — appreciated the homage. But I wonder if Baumbach is fully aware of the implications such a reference portends: Bergman directed Scenes from a Marriage just three years after ending his relationship with the film’s star, Liv Ullmann. During their years together, Bergman produced some of his strangest and most challenging films: Persona, Shame, The Passion of Anna. He also berated Ullmann and kept her locked up, a prisoner in their house.
Don’t forget either that Mia Farrow left Woody Allen the same year she appeared in his homage to Bergman’s movie. I’m not trying to be clairvoyant here — I’d just like to understand what about this specific legacy speaks to Noah Baumbach.
He first worked with Greta Gerwig when she was twenty-six and he was forty, on the set of his film Greenberg (2010). They collaborated again on Frances Ha (‘13), but had already been living together for two years. (Baumbach divorced his first wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, later that fall.) Creativity-wise, Gerwig has said in interviews that she constantly references Noah’s opinion, and I can just picture her getting up from the sofa and wandering into his office, bowing over his shoulder as he reads her papers on Louisa May Alcott.
Apparently, though, Noah doesn’t like to share his work with Greta. He’ll lower his laptop screen as she tries to get a glimpse at what he’s writing. Too bad — I’m sure Ms. Gerwig could have helped. As they say: when in doubt, look to the children.
The opening sequence of Marriage Story depicts Noah and Jennif— I mean, Charlie and Nicole during a more pleasant period in their marriage: playing boardgames, sharing birthday gifts and, as director and star, rehearsing the Great American Minimalist Theater Piece. (Black turtlenecks? Check. Modern dancing? You bet.) These memories are narrated, because it helps to be told that a haircut involves scissors (“Nicole gives good haircuts”) and that switching off lights is a good way to save electricity (“Charlie is energy-conscious”). But then, cut! We suddenly find ourselves in a therapist’s office. Nicole and Charlie are seated in armchairs, clutching legal pads. “Nicole gives good haircuts…” “Charlie is energy-conscious…” Turns out, the voiceover we heard was actually lists of bullet-points they’ve written describing one another’s attributes.
Unfortunately, these good qualities, copious though they may be, aren’t good enough to keep the marriage afloat. The lists are just exercises in civility; once written, the therapist asks that the Barbers read their lists out loud, but Nicole doesn’t want to. Presumably, there’s much worse stuff we don’t yet know about their marriage. But we already know so much! Five minutes into the movie, and I can tell you twenty things about Charlie Barber that would make your head spin. And don’t get me started on Nicole — what man could leave a woman who takes the time to play with their own son?
A word of advice, Mr. Baumbach: listing a character’s “attributes” doesn’t establish character so much as it forces one. Details of personality are best discovered by an audience, not told to them. In the opening sequence and everywhere else, Marriage Story is too neat for its own good — too calculated to allow for spontaneity, too pledged to “realism” to allow for magic. It’s said that Noah Baumbach makes his actors adhere precisely to his dialogue, as written. Woody Allen favors a similar method; so did Ingmar Bergman. Given the energetic clarity of a film like Lady Bird (2017), it seems that Noah could have learned something from his girlfriend. Maybe next time he shouldn’t be so precious about his process.
Once the Barbers leave their therapist, we gradually pick up on the dirt in their relationship. For one thing, Charlie has cheated on Nicole. For another, Nicole has felt for years that her opinions have gone unheeded: Charlie’s theater company is in Brooklyn, so the family has remained in Brooklyn. But her mother and sister live in Los Angeles; she’s been sent movie scripts from Hollywood; Charlie’s even been offered director’s residencies in that city. But still they’ve stayed. So she moves back to L.A. to accept a role in a new TV series. And while out there, she visits a flashy divorce attorney named Nora (Laura Dern) — lithe, breezy and out for the kill.
Suddenly, what was meant to be an amicable separation spins into a full-blown legal battle. Nicole brings their son out to L.A., and Charlie must scramble with limited finances and a crowded professional schedule to find a lawyer for himself. Otherwise, he may lose custody. Money, air miles and literal blood are let to arrive at some kind of agreement. Mr. Baumbach has described his movie as “a love story about divorce,” but Marriage Story is more of a clouded study in the ways women inconvenience or hoodwink well-intentioned men.
This cloaked misogyny comes down again to Baumbach’s use of exposition instead of action. All of the insensitivity that Nicole claims she endured in her marriage happens before the movie begins; we’re shown that Charlie doesn’t understand his wife’s wish to move to L.A., but that’s about it. We don’t see how he’s hurt her. What we do see is an unscrupulous (female) divorce attorney persuade Nicole to think of her husband as an enemy — and to then completely upend his life. Marriage Story may be swathed in liberal sentiments, but that doesn’t change its soul. It doesn’t want to hate women, but it does anyway.
The plot of hinges on Nicole’s gullibility and Nora’s machinations. Charlie’s life is disproportionately affected by the divorce: we watch him plod through office buildings in search of a good lawyer; forfeit professional opportunities; run through grant money on legal fees. Nicole may claim victimhood, but we only ever witness Charlie’s. And that makes all the difference — audiences trust what they can see. The night I saw Marriage Story, in a theater, two women who were sitting ahead of me turned to one another once the movie’d ended and agreed, “That woman was a bitch.”
The film is not without its attempts at feminism: Nicole has a tearful monologue that provides the illusion of cathartic empowerment, and Nora is granted a cheap but nonetheless thrilling sermon where she rips society’s vilification of mothers. (“You will always be held to a different, higher standard.”) But these scenes are deliberate and self-conscious; they’re explanations rather than observable drama. If we consider what parts of the Barbers’ marriage are explained to us — versus the parts which we actually witness — we arrive at Noah Baumbach’s inherent, personal prejudice: he wants to tell Charlie’s story, and merely fulfills his obligation to include Nicole’s point of view. He tacks it on, to give the impression of “balance.”
I promise this isn’t hyperbole. If you break down Marriage Story’s runtime into three discrete groups — a). scenes that include both Charlie and Nicole; b). scenes that focus on Nicole’s activity apart from Charlie; and c). scenes that depict Charlie apart from Nicole — it reveals some pretty glaring disparities. The movie is one hundred and thirty minutes long. Sixty-one of those minutes show Charlie and Nicole together; of the remaining seventy-nine, only twenty-six minutes depict Nicole on her own. Furthermore, there are only four occasions when the narrative shifts to center itself on Nicole, and while the first of these shifts results in a sequence (i.e., the one where she arrives in L.A. and visits Nora) that lasts twenty minutes, her following solo appearances last less than three minutes each.
By contrast, Charlie is onscreen more than one-and-a-half times longer than his wife, and appears on his own more frequently: while the plot shifts to Nicole’s point of view on four occasions, it reorients itself to Charlie’s perspective a total of seven times. He is more visible, and more spread out. This is a screenwriter’s version of man-spreading.
Filmmakers have the right to tell whatever stories they want; I’m uninterested in censorship, or in condemning artists for pursuing their creative instincts. But there’s an argument to be made that cinema went to hell as soon as directors started treating their job like therapy. Marriage Story is a wan, indulgent staging of self-pity. Like the work of Woody Allen or Ingmar Bergman, it hasn’t half the wit or sophistication it thinks it has. The plot plods along until it can let its central male figure off the hook: Nora finagles a disproportionate custody deal that shafts Charlie out of a fifty-fifty settlement, simply out of spite. This disturbs Nicole, who finally sees her lady lawyer’s villainy and resolves to show warmth toward her estranged, “insensitive” ex.
A woman moves away from her husband, and then returns to him. Order is restored in the kingdom; the wounded alpha need lick his wounds no longer — he has his former wife and new girlfriend to do that.
All of this is especially embarrassing because Noah Baumbach’s live-in muse has simultaneously directed a movie called Little Women. That film is supposedly a feminist triumph, yet I notice Ms. Gerwig has yet to publicly locate any fault in her partner’s movie — a sign of fidelity, no doubt, and of gratitude that, in Marriage Story, Charlie’s mistress is treated with kid gloves. Then again, could Gerwig be aware of a greater political messaging in Marriage Story that I haven’t noticed? One could argue, I guess, that Baumbach’s refusal to indulge in Nicole’s story is a metaphysical means of illustrating how inhospitable movies are to women’s experiences. (It could also be a gesture of mercy toward his audience so they don’t have to spend too much time watching Scarlett Johansson.)
But I don’t credit him with such depths of irony: Baumbach is a lean urban nostalgist, a Park Slope brat who indulges in autobiography for want of more probing material. His shallowness has worked in his favor before — Frances Ha and The Squid and the Whale (2005) are lucid, wry movies about shallow, grandiose people — but in the last decade he’s averaged a film every two years. That’s way too often for a man who doesn’t have much to say.
It’s unlikely that either he or Gerwig will win anything on Sunday: soppy personal memoir and sisterly romance can’t hold a candle to war in the eyes of the Academy. The couple can go home to their baby and sleep in peace, their consciences clean. They may be hypocrites, but at least they didn’t direct Joker.
