50 Time November 11, 2019
REVIEW
Scenes from a marriage,
and the scars left behind
By Stephanie Zacharek
in The days when movie sTars used To appear in main-
stream melodramas made for grownups—when we used to
have mainstream melodramas made for grownups—it meant
something to watch suffering play out on a deeply famil-
iar face. Joan Crawford, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck:
surely, with their charisma and their carriage, these people
couldn’t be as susceptible to emotional torment as we mere
mortals are. But then you’d see their hearts being broken or
their spirits being crushed, and the sting was acute. They re-
minded you that no one is too beautiful to feel pain.
That’s the effect of watching Scarlett Johansson and Adam
Driver, two of our own most appealing modern movie stars, in
writer-director Noah Baumbach’s devastating Marriage Story.
Johansson and Driver play Nicole and Charlie, the two halves
of a disintegrating couple: He’s a smart, modestly successful
theater director about to debut his first show on Broadway.
She’s his star actor, enormously gifted but overshadowed by
her husband’s ambition and outsize confidence.
Nicole and Charlie have a son together, Henry (Azhy Rob-
ertson), whom they clearly adore. But things have gone jag-
gedly wrong between them. Nicole is about to leave the fami-
ly’s home in New York for Los Angeles, where she’ll be filming
a TV pilot—it’s a big deal for her, though she senses Charlie
looks down on the project. (He kind of does.) She’ll be taking
Henry with her, and although the understanding is that the
two will return to New York after her work is done, the act of
dissolving the marriage is already in progress.
△
Johansson,
Robertson and
Driver: a family
forever, even after
a marriage diesNicole and Charlie have made it clear
to each other and to everyone else that
their split is going to be friendly, with
minimal impact on Henry. But once
Nicole reaches Los Angeles, the pro-
ceedings escalate. She connects with
an almost diabolically shrewd divorce
lawyer (Laura Dern, in a performance
as cleanly chiseled as her collarbones).
And before long, Nicole and Charlie are
barely speaking, with Henry’s future the
fulcrum between them.If BaumBach has, until this point,
merely signaled that these two char-
acters will inflict great pain upon each
other, this is where he really opens the
floodgates. Nicole and Charlie spar and
claw at one another, drawing figura-
tive blood if not the real kind. (At one
point, Charlie semi-inadvertently slices
into one of his own veins.) Their mutual
antagonism is wrenching to watch be-
cause they, and Baumbach, have already
shown us what things were like in bet-
ter times. Both Baumbach’s script and
his direction are achingly perceptive.
He never attempts to explain why this
marriage fell apart, perhaps because he
knows that no one outside a marriage
can know the truth of it.
And his actors, living that secret out
loud for us, are astonishing. Driver’s
features are rubbery, agile, insanely
likable—he’s got the kind of nose ba-
bies love to grab. To see Charlie close
down—to see his face as swollen as a
thundercloud with anguish and anger—
is to see a movie star channel the very
things we’ve all, at one time or another,
struggled to suppress. Johansson’s mode
is different but no less affecting. She
sends feeling out in packets of light—
one minute she bathes you in a pale,
reassuring night-light glow; the next
might be a power-surge flash, as if some
unseen, wrathful goddess were sending
lightning bolts to earth through her fin-
gertips. But mostly, Nicole guards her
feelings more closely than Charlie does.
Her subterranean vulnerability is like a
heartbeat you can see. There’s no win-
ner at the end of Marriage Story—only
two people who have lost. Torn asunder,
they leave us, too, feeling bereft.MARRIAGE STORY opens in limited theaters
Nov. 6 before streaming on Netflix Dec. 6TimeOff Movies