Marriage Story: The Messy End of a Love Affair -

By Miriam Trujillo

Marriage Story, starring Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, is a tragedy told through camera angles. It is a descent into unspeakable sorrow portrayed through a screenplay full of subtext and subtlety. The plot of Marriage Story may be simple, but it is only through the use of every important tool cinema can offer (storytelling, dialogue, soundtrack, and, especially, cinematography ) that Marriage Story comes across as a searing piece of art, well worthy of its Best Picture nomination.

The plot is quite simple. Nicole (Johansson) and Charlie (Driver), actors by trade, are going through a divorce. They are prepared to get it over with as amicably and peacefully as possible, but when Nicole hires a powerful lawyer, the entire process derails into a bloodthirsty vicious game over custody and property. Both spouses’ characters are dragged through the mud, and their privacy is utterly destroyed.

The director, Noah Baumbach, however, chose to start this ugly tale with a moment of sincere positivity. Voiced over a montage of shots depicting the couple’s happy life with each other, the couple describes in carefully chosen words what they like about each other. Once the audience is happily duped into thinking that this is a happy marriage, the camera cuts to the present. The pair are in a mediator’s office, preparing to separate.

From there, Baumbach’s minute storytelling decisions are all executed in a series of limpid pictures, shots much more beautiful than the story they portray. The sad contrast between visual beauty and devastating action mirrors another contrast of the work. A contrast that is subtly depicted and yet gets to the heart of why Marriage Story is such a poignant narrative: Charlie and Nicole regard each other much more fondly than their legal teams represent. The pair understand each other and have spent many years working together. Yet, in order for their lawyers to feel like they have had a proper victory, small, negative details about their shared lives are blown up, fights are augmented, exchanges of words are willfully misunderstood, and their own child is weaponized as a point of contention.

The legal proceedings of the divorce feel unnatural when compared to the actual reasons why Charlie and Nicole are splitting up. The mudslinging that goes on via lawyers nearly feels laughable when the audience sees how Nicole and Charlie really are when they are together. The extreme sensitivity that they have towards each others’ small needs and tastes could only have resulted from many years of living together and sharing life. Yet, they are entirely incapable of realizing the big ways in which they have failed each other as spouses.

Marriage Story’s unexpected decision to recognize the bond that forms between husbands and wives of many years elevates this movie from the typical “end of a love affair” tale. It makes the characters involved so complex that we can’t really bear to choose sides. Instead, the movie can prompt hours of character analysis in a heartbreaking attempt to understand how two well-meaning people can wreak so much havoc in each other’s lives. Nicole was genuinely wounded in her marriage, as her husband did not love her in the equal and trusting way that she deserved. Charlie even committed the highest of treasons and had an affair. Yet, Nicole is perfectly willing to sit back and let her lawyer destroy the entire life of a man she once loved. This decision is indefensible.

In the course of the movie, Charlie goes to heroic lengths to see his son. He willingly gives up a brilliant directing career and the home he loved so much in New York to keep up a relationship with his son in Los Angeles; a thankless task as his son became more and more connected with his mother. If Charlie had been half as good a husband as he was a father, however, he may not have lost his wife. Even Nicole’s merciless lawyer has a brilliantly placed monologue so full of anger and hurt at the world in general, that one suddenly understands why she has been so venomous professionally.

These are not typical, two-dimensional characters, and their stories are not a victorious vindication of their divorce. Rather, the movie aims for a different, less conventional and more artistically satisfying, resolution. Marriage Story, as a complex whole, painfully implies that there always is a bond between a once-married couple, for better or for worse.