Someone to hold me too close, to hurt me too deep.
Once upon a time, the biggest movies of the year didn’t just include franchises and blockbusters. In 1983, the highest grossing film of the year was Return of the Jedi; second place belonged to James L. Brooks’ Terms of Endearment, which grossed $108 million on a budget of $8 million. I wish the moviegoing landscape were still as hospitable to such human stories. Writer/director Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is a hilarious, heartbreaking picture that is easily in the same league as films like Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News, and it deserves to be seen and adored in the same fashion.
Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical tale centers on Charlie and Nicole Barber, a New York theater director and an LA-bound actress, respectively, beginning to end their 10 year marriage. Nicole moves to Los Angeles to shoot a pilot while Charlie continues working with their avant garde theater company back east. Caught between the two is their young son Henry, who has moved with his mother to California. Charlie sees this as temporary thing, and when his wife and son return to New York, they’ll get an apartment nearby their current one; an amicable, calm de-coupling. The more time they spend apart, the more each realizes what they want this new chapter to look like, and how divergent those paths would be.
Marriage Story is filled with awkward, bitter moments befitting a tough divorce and custody battle, but it’s nonetheless one of the warmest, funniest, most comforting films I’ve seen all year. It begins with a lovely montage wherein Charlie and Nicole each narrate the things they love about the other, listing habits and qualities that acquaint us with our protagonists at their most charming. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson have never been better, each living up to that charm yet providing each of their characters with believable lows. Neither Charlie nor Nicole are perfect, and neither character is meant to be a villain to the other or their son.
Baumbach has crafted a love story about two people who can no longer be together finding the common ground that will give their son the happy life they want for him. It’s a delicate balance where nearly every character, even the divorce attorneys, make convincing arguments rooted in emotional truth. Though the film belongs to Driver and Johansson, Laura Dern’s fiercely competent lawyer for Nicole is at turns a strategic shark and sympathetic counselor. She helps Nicole realize what it is she really wants out of this new life away from Charlie, and as a result, it may require playing legal hardball. She may make things more difficult than Charlie and Nicole had hoped, but she’s not wrong, either.
Marriage Story also receives a strong emotional throughline from composer Randy Newman. His score is warm and playful, but not without appropriate melancholy. Though Newman doesn’t immediately come to mind when I think of my favorite composers, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that his music is more or less the soundtrack to my childhood. His scores for many of the early Pixar films defined a sound for the studio that has a pavlovian effect for me that tugs at my heartstrings; Newman’s score for Marriage Story sounds like it could be for a Toy Story movie, and that’s fitting. It’s the same emotional space: moving on, growing apart, reflecting on the love and people who made you who you are.
I could go on and on about Marriage Story, from the wonderfully grainy cinematography to the thoughtful use of a Sondheim standard, but I also would rather you see it without further explanation. It’s so tremendously moving and entertaining that I can’t wait to revisit it, be it when the film hits Netflix in December, or once again during its limited theatrical release. I so wish it didn’t take a streaming behemoth padding out its content library for a beautiful movie like this to get made, but I’d rather have it in the world under these circumstances than not at all. Noah Baumbach’s film is a tender look at finding a new kind of love amid divorce, and though it won’t see the kind of success a James L. Brooks film might have received in 1983, it’s no less deserving of your attention and admiration.
I see a lot of movies, and Marriage Story is the very best thing I’ve seen all year.