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MOVIES
TELLURIDE, Colo. — Noah
Baumbach wasn’t quite sure what
time zone his body was in.
In the span of a few days, the
filmmaker had flown from New
York to the Venice Film Festival,
where his divorce drama “Marriage
Story” premiered to acclaim, and
then to the Telluride Film Festival.
Now, on the morning of his movie’s
first screening in the picturesque
Colorado mountain town, he sat on
the couch in his rented condo, feel-
ing discombobulated.
“I was awake at, like, 5:30, which
was bad because I went to bed after
1,” he said, his fingers wrapped
around a cup of life-giving coffee.
Soon, he’d be on a plane to the To-
ronto International Film Festival.
The nonstop travel, screenings,
parties and interviews of the fall
festival season can leave anyone
feeling drained, but Baumbach has
been buoyed by the rapturous re-
ception “Marriage Story” has re-
ceived so far. Critics have hailed
the picture as the strongest work
yet from the writer-director, whose
10 previous films include “Kicking
and Screaming,” “The Squid and
the Whale” and “The Meyerowitz
Stories,” and a worthy addition the
pantheon of classic divorce movies
such as “Kramer vs. Kramer,”
“Scenes From a Marriage” and
“Shoot the Moon.” Oscar prognos-
ticators expect the film to follow
the path of last year’s “Roma” to
earn Netflix — which will release it
in theaters Nov. 6 and via stream-
ing Dec. 6 — another shot at a cov-
eted best picture Oscar.
Through it all, Baumbach, 50, is
just trying to keep his head on
straight. “Staying off the internet is
helpful,” he said dryly. “But at the
same time, it’s always just nice
when people like what you’ve done.
You go into all of the movies with
the same intention, which is just to
make it as good as you can.”
By turns wrenching, tender and
darkly comic, “Marriage Story”
stars Scarlett Johansson and Ad-
am Driver as Nicole and Charlie, a
longtime couple with a young son
whose marriage is coming apart.
Despite their best intentions of
having an amicable split, the two
find themselves dragged into an in-
creasingly messy divorce, as Nic-
ole, an actress, moves to Los Ange-
les with their child to work on a TV
pilot while Charlie, a theater direc-
tor, insists on trying to keep the
splintering family in New York.
Drawing in part from Baum-
bach’s own experience as both a
child of divorce and a divorcé him-
self (he separated from actress
Jennifer Jason Leigh in 2010 after a
five-year marriage), “Marriage
Story” delves into aspects of what
he calls “the divorce-industrial
complex” — emotional, legal, fi-
nancial, parental — that are often
hidden from view.
“It’s interesting, for something
that’s so common in our society,
how little of the process is actually
known,” he said. “It’s sort of hap-
pening under our noses. It’s both
such a big subject on its own, and
there’s so much that comes out
during it that opens up all these
other narrative possibilities.”
For the cast, Baumbach’s
screenplay offered the sort of fer-
tile dramatic terrain that actors
live for, said Laura Dern, who plays
Nicole’s tenacious divorce lawyer.
“I’ve never cried so hard over a
script in my life,” Dern said. “I re-
member being 6, 7 years old, watch-
ing my mom, [Diane Ladd], on a
movie with Scorsese, my dad,
[Bruce Dern], on a movie with Hal
Ashby, listening to the words,
watching their collaboration, and
going, ‘I want to do that thing.’ I
read Noah’s script and said, ‘This is
the kind of movie that made us
want to make movies.’ ”
Though divorce has been a
theme in a number of Baumbach’s
films — including 2005’s “The
Squid and the Whale,” which
earned him an original screenplay
Oscar nomination — “Marriage
Story” actually came out of an im-
pulse to explore the subject of love.
“For a long time, I’d been wanting
to make a love story, but I had no
idea how to come at it,” said Baum-
bach, now romantically involved
with director and actress Greta
Gerwig, who co-wrote and starred
in his 2012 film “Frances Ha.” “In
looking at a couple breaking up, I
sort of found this opportunity to
tell a love story in its absence.”
While working on the script,
Baumbach spoke with friends
who’d been through marital break-
ups as well as divorce attorneys,
judges and mediators. But the ech-
oes of his own life are undeniable.
Like Charlie, he is a director who
was married to an actress, with
whom he has a son. Though a dyed-
in-the-wool native New Yorker (“I
didn’t learn how to drive until I was
40”), he also has a place in L.A. and
feels the tug of both cities.
As such, Baumbach well knows
that many viewers will wonder just
how autobiographical “Marriage
Story” is. “I saw this interview with
Philip Roth where he described his
process as taking two stones of re-
ality and rubbing them together so
they spark the imagination,” he
said by way of answering. “I related
to that. I think most of my writing
has begun that way. I like to know
where I am, just as a way to start;
I’ll go to a time in my life or a con-
versation, a place, a smell, a city. I
understand it triggers that ques-
tion. But, for me, it’s often a place to
start, knowing that it’s an opportu-
nity for transformation.
“I think the movies are masks in
a way,” he continued. “I mean, I
wouldn’t know how to go about
telling a story from my own life ex-
actly. Things are more autobio-
graphical in places that people
wouldn’t even think to ask about.”
Having worked with Driver on2014’s “While We’re Young,” Baum-
bach knew that he wanted the
actor to play Charlie. But when he
first sat down with Johansson to
discuss the project over lunch (the
two had met years earlier at a per-
formance of Pink Floyd’s “The
Wall” by Roger Waters), he wasn’t
sure if the actress — who at the
time was going through her second
divorce — would be interested.
“She started telling me what
was going on, which I didn’t know,
and I had this thought that she was
either going to hate this or love
this,” Baumbach said. “But she
was so open to it right away. I re-
spected that about her, that she
was not concerned in any way.
Maybe she saw it as an opportuni-
ty, because it was something that
was close to her as well.”
That’s not to say that actually
making the film wasn’t sometimes
emotionally grueling — particu-
larly in a climactic scene in whichCharlie and Nicole air years of
pent-up grievances in one blister-
ing fight. The 10-minute scene was
shot over two days and, given
Baumbach’s propensity for shoot-
ing numerous takes, Johansson
and Driver needed to repeatedly go
to places of tearful anguish and un-
controllable rage.
“That was an incredibly reward-
ing thing to shoot and also a really
tough thing to shoot,” Baumbach
said. “I generally retain emotional
distance from the material while
I’m making it, but I couldn’t keep
distance from that. I would feel bad
and I also felt very responsible for
them because they exposed them-
selves so much.”
For his part, Driver relished the
chance to keep trying to go deeper.
“You got the luxury of 10, 15, some-
times more takes to explore and be
surprised by the writing,” he said.
“Good writing opens up your
imagination to different ways ofreading it. The script was so beau-
tifully written, it was just a matter
of not trying to put too much on top
of it and just believing what you
were saying.”
“Marriage Story” had initially
been set up at Amazon Studios,
but after the company pulled out
amid personnel changes, Netflix —
which had released 2017’s “The
Meyerowitz Stories” — quickly
stepped in. “Netflix didn’t wait a
heartbeat,” said “Marriage Story”
producer David Heyman. “They
loved the script, and they believed
in Noah. They have been incredibly
supportive on all fronts.”
Having spent his entire career
telling adult-oriented stories,
Baumbach knows how difficult it
can be these days to get people to
leave their houses to see those
types of movies. But while he has
expressed misgivings about the
streaming shift propelled by Net-
flix, he’s been encouraged by the
company’s dedication to “Mar-
riage Story,” which it’s giving a
longer exclusive theatrical window
than any other film it has released.
“I’ve been fortunate to find peo-
ple who’ve supported what I want
to do, and I work at a budget level
that doesn’t put undue pressure on
them,” he said. “While it’s harder
now in some ways, because of com-
panies like Netflix there are also
more opportunities. Yeah, I look at
what’s in the theater and wish that
there were more movies that were
made for me. But when you know
where to look, there’s always great
and exciting stuff. So I don’t know.
I’m figuring out where we’re all
going as much as you are.”
Still, for Baumbach, nothing
can replace the experience of sit-
ting in a darkened theater, sharing
an intimate film such as “Marriage
Story” with perfect strangers: “In a
theater, you’re vulnerable. You’re
there. It’s happening in front of
you,” he said. “It gives you the op-
portunity to give things a chance.
Some of my favorite movies, maybe
you don’t know right away what
you think. Then, when you come
to it, you love it that much more.
Because, in a way, you found it.”The unseen sides of divorce
The semi-autobiographical
‘Marriage Story’ might be
Noah Baumbach’s best and
Netflix’s next contender.
By Josh Rottenberg
“THINGS are more autobiographical in places that people wouldn’t even think to ask about,” says writer-director Noah Baumbach.Béatrice de GéaFor The TimesNICOLE(Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) are on the rocks in “Marriage Story.”Wilson WebbNetflix