Back in the DVD heyday I was one of countless people who loved hoarding Criterions. I remember people’s willingness, if they couldn’t get them at places like Best Buy, to pay top dollar prices to get them from Border’s and other retailers that charged the full MSRP (of course those places are pretty much all extinct now).
To say the least, physical discs aren’t as popular as they were in the early 2000s, but sometimes one still might be worth it – say if it’s made by the Criterion Collection and loaded with bonus features. Was very glad to see last year’s Marriage Story added to the pantheon this summer. It’s certainly a movie in the vein of some previous Criterion titles such as Scenes from a Marriage.
Marriage can be a minefield, or so I’ve heard from people who have tried it. There’s a famous quote attributed to Hemingway about how the way to be a great writer is to sit down and bleed onto the page. Considering how painful I’ve heard divorce can be, or heck how painful trying to make a marriage work can be, it takes a lot of guts who write a script inspired by your own such experiences – and many think writer/director Noah Baumbach based this on his own split from The Hateful Eight star Jennifer Jason Leigh.
If so, did his bravery pay off? Yes!
The movie starts off with letters read by Nicole and Charlie about all the things they love about each other, before abruptly switching to the office of the marriage counselor who made them write those letters and now unsuccessfully tries to get them read out loud. We immediately see how, even if two people love each other deeply, marriage can be hard and doomed to fail.
What went wrong with this marriage though? Having watched the whole film, I feel the movie primarily puts the blame on Charlie. As far as he was concerned, life was perfect. He ran a theatre company whose members were the family he didn’t have growing up, he was living his dream as an acclaimed theatre director, and he got to go home to a wife and son whom he loved. The wife often made clear she wasn’t happy with their arrangement, yet Charlie chose to brush that aside. It’s repeatedly brought up during the movie how he had promised Nicole they would eventually spend time living in Los Angeles instead of New York so she could pursue screen acting again and be near her family, yet he doesn’t even attempt to address that.
While the movie does show a good job presenting arguments from both sides – Charlie’s career first gained notoriety thanks to Nicole but Nicole’s career gained prestige due to Charlie, Charlie cheated on Nicole but it was after Nicole hadn’t wanted to be intimate for over a year, Nicole blindsided Charlie by filing for divorce but it was after years of trying to talk to him about her pain failed – ultimately the central conflict of the marriage is that Charlie wasn’t sensitive to his wife’s needs and I believe that’s why the film ended the way it did.
That, and the lawyers. Former Jurassic Park star Laura Dern had quite a comeback over the previous dozen years, between two Golden Globes, an Emmy, and an Oscar nomination. Now, with this movie, she not only got another nomination but etched herself into the history books by winning Best Supporting Actress, beating out her own costar Scarlett Johansson (who was nominated for JoJo Rabbit). She and Ray Liotta both play sharks, but while his character seems to view the case as merely a job, hers seems to view it as a battle for women’s rights everywhere. Nora is the person who eggs Nicole into making such a big deal out of what was supposed to be a peaceful separation, and, more so than Nicole, she views it as a battle to be WON.
Nora’s motivation is apparently frustration at a world in which women are criticized for having careers instead of focusing on children while men get lauded for changing a diaper once. Is her anger justified? I say yes but the more important question is whether it’s okay for her to be projecting her feelings onto Charlie and his lawyer, to the extent that she’s not even respecting Nicole’s wishes. I say no, but the movie doesn’t make judgements. It simply presents the unraveling of the marriage and leaves you free to react however feels right. The one thing we can all agree on is that it’s captivating!
A dialogue-heavy, character-driven story all about a conflict between two people will fall flat unless both actors are amazing in their roles. No problem here, because the leads are amazing!
Adam Driver had proven to me the adage about how you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. My first exposure to him was on Girls, where he played a sniveling guy wanting schlubby Lena Dunham to watch him masturbate. That was nauseating enough that it was the main reason I never watched the show again. Watching The Force Awakens, I knew I’d seen him somewhere but didn’t realize where until the end credits, when I couldn’t believe whiny masturbating guy got a part as huge as Kylo-Ren. I got frustrated thinking, “Now we’ll never see the last of him!” *
I wound up liking him in BlacKkKlansman but still got appalled hearing women talking about having crushes on him. At this point, though, I agree he’s a great actor and understand the appeal. Congratulations to him on ultimately being able to rise above the scripts he took to get famous, ha ha.
Scarlett Johansson had been a crush of mine since 2001’s Ghost World, when she was a teenager and I practically still was myself. I was bummed out that she didn’t get a Best Actress nomination either for Lost In Translation or Girl With A Pearl Earning two years later when getting one would have meant, at 19, she earned the record for youngest Best Actress nominee ever.** Perhaps Focus Features, the distributor of Lost In Translation, shot themselves in the foot by campaigning for her as a Supporting Actress in their heavy Oscar favorite and only further splitting the vote. Then again, though, I couldn’t argue much with people saying she wasn’t that great of an actress. She’d shown some talent but hadn’t blown me away.
Since that breakout year in 2003, Johansson has gone on to a terrific career, most notably as Black Widow in the MCU. Her roles for a decade and a half made wonderful use of her looks, charm, and athleticism, but not so much her acting ability. In 2019, though, she finally showed she her gifts as a thespian. Just like Driver, she displayed in this movie a wonderful combination of vulnerability, anger, resolve, charm, and love, and flowed between them seamlessly and organically.
I was so excited to see Johansson become only the 12th person nominated for lead and supporting Oscars the same year. I was just as unhappy to see her not win either, as besides the JoJo loss mentioned earlier she lost Best Actress to Judy’s Renee Zellwegger.*** Instead of joining the ranks of her three predecessors who won the lead Oscar, or even the four who won the supporting Oscar, she joined the four who won neither. Of those four Emma Thompson (1993) and Cate Blanchett (2007) could each take solace in already having an Oscar on her mantle. I hope Johansson at least joins the ranks of Julianne Moore, who won Best Actress a dozen years after her double goose egg, instead of Sigourney Weaver, who never got an Oscar and, in her 70s, probably has to accept that the opportunity is gone.
Whether or not Johansson ever wins an Academy Award, and whether or not Driver ever does, and whether or not Baumbach ever does, or heck whether or not Liotta or any other Oscar-less person who worked on this film ever does, they should all be proud for giving us a wonderful movie like Marriage Story.
Bottom line: Well done!
Up Next: The spiritual predecessor.
*Then again, Hayden Christensen might say otherwise.
**Of course, that’s assuming she would have been nominated INSTEAD of 13-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes, who was nominated the same year. In any case the record would have been shattered by nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis a decade later.
***Ugh, I can’t stand Renee. I got mad enough when she got a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Cold Mountain, which coincidentally was in 2003.
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