Marriage Story

The easiest way to deal with Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story -- which began streaming on Netflix today -- would be to call it the best Woody Allen movie in a couple of decades. A genuinely funny and ultimately moving case study of the uncoupling of two intelligent, artistic members of the cultural elite that contrasts New York with Los Angeles, theater with TV, and rigorous artistic investigation with the powerful lure of celebrity.

Another way to look at the film is as a lightly disguised autobiography, since there are many obvious parallels between Baumbach's real-life divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh in 2013 and the coming apart of fictional avant-garde stage director Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) the L.A. actress who gave up her mainstream career for him and his strange little plays. (In real life, Leigh acted in Baumbach's films Margot at the Wedding and Greenberg and co-wrote the story of the latter. I once did a joint interview with them and came away with the impression that they regarded themselves as a creative team.)

But neither of these deconstructive approaches is worthy of the movie Baumbach has made in collaboration with Johansson and Driver, fine and underrated actors who do their career-best work here.

Every marriage is a black box with its works mysterious even to those intimately involved. We all make strange compacts with our partners and often it is difficult to say why and what it is we have conceded. Two people can get all tangled up in one another, and if one means to -- needs to -- maintain a separate self, sometimes the only solution is to cut one's way out. That will be messy, no matter how civil and kind the snarled-together parties mean to be to one another. When sharp tools are employed, there will be blood.

I stopped thinking about Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach seconds into this movie, which opens with back-to-back monologues about why each loves the other, playing over a montage of the other's best behavior. Nicole gives great gifts, Charlie says, she's his favorite actress and completely committed to their 8-year-old son Henry (Azhy Robertson). Charlie, Nicole says, is self-sufficient and a self-made man who came to New York from a troubled family and founded a successful (if modestly scaled) theatre.

It turns out these monologues are the text of letters they're been asked to write by a counselor helping them work through their separation. Neither gets to hear the others' reasons for loving the other because at the session Nicole refuses to read hers aloud. It's dumb, and she doesn't like what she wrote. And so she refuses to hear Charlie's letter, though he's quite proud of what he's written. Which gets close to the nub of the problem -- Charlie is always pretty proud of himself.

By Nicole's lights, he has subsumed her. She doesn't even know what her own taste is because she's never been asked to use it. She's Charlie's star, and when she gave up the world of teenage sex comedies for his theater company, she was the main draw -- a name actress who put backsides in the seats. But now, Charlie's star has risen and she's seen as a curiosity, the girl from that movie who now acts in her husband's plays.

She wants something for herself, so she runs off to Los Angeles, to shelter in her mother's (a wonderfully ditzy Julie Hagerty) house and film a TV pilot. She takes Henry with her. She realizes how much she has missed the sun.

Though Charlie and Nicole have discussed their divorce and agreed it ought to be amicable and that they really didn't have that much worth fighting over, his assumption was always that she'd stay in New York. That is their home, after all, where Henry goes to school and has his friends.

But once she's escaped Charlie's gravitational pull, Nicole wants something different. She hires Nora (a fabulous Laura Dern who, between this, Little Women and HBO's Big Little Lies, is having a fabulous year), a predatory lawyer who walks her through the conventions of the divorce-industrial complex.

Soon Charlie is looking for an L.A.-based lawyer of his own (not easy, since Nicole, presumably at Nora's instructions, has already taken meetings with 17 of the top attorneys in the area, rendering them unable to take Charlie's case). When he finally winds up with amiable, loquacious and fatalistic Bert Spitz (Alan Alda), whose specialty is entertainment contracts but who knows a little bit about how the game is played, he's advised to move out of his hotel and get a local apartment.

But Charlie still has a lot of things to attend to in New York. His production of Electra, which had starred Nicole, is going to Broadway. He needs to devote his attention to the play. But Henry is in California, and Nicole, through her proxy, has forced him to escalate the legal battle. Which he eventually does, replacing avuncular, expectations-depressing Bert with $950-an-hour Jay (a welcome, otter-sleek Ray Liotta) in preparation of scorching some earth of his own.

The takeaway is that these seem like nice people, the kind of folks we might imagine ourselves and our friends to be. Moment to moment, the film changes from wistful to melancholic, from laugh-out-loud funny to dark and even, in the midst of a highly realistic fight between Nicole and Charlie, terrifying. See it with someone you love, but try to keep your eyes straight ahead.

You might quibble with a moment late in the film when Charlie sings, in a semi-natural situation, Stephen Sondheim's "Being Alive" in a New York theater district piano bar. For a moment the movie wobbles along with Driver's good-enough but hardly Broadway-quality voice. It might have marred the ending, were it the ending.

But it's not, and the movie ends a few minutes later on a grace note, with Nicole lending her now ex-husband a little tender help. They will never be out of each others' lives; the reasons they cared for each other were real. But so were the reasons to quit.

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MovieStyle on 12/06/2019