Marriage Story: BFI Film Festival
5 stars
What I love about Marriage Story. It’s a great film, moving. The writing is provoking and rexal. It’s a film that’s honest, really honest. It makes you cry. It makes you laugh. It’s very clear about what it wants to portray. It is excellent.
If this introduction seems a little strange to you, it will soon become apparent from the beginning moments of this film, where we open with two heart-warming monologues from our protagonists followed by a startling yet hilarious realisation. With its UK premiere at the BFI Film Festival, Marriage Story follows actress Nicole (Scarlett Johannson) and her stage-director husband, Charlie (Adam Driver), through their messy divorce split between L.A and New York.
After quietly building a catalogue of films over the last 15 years, Noah Baumbach has built a reputation on excellent and authentic dialogue, and this is no different, with Marriage Story his best work since Frances Ha. Like many Noah Baumbach stories, this film is heavily centred around the characters and the relationships they have with each other on screen, with Driver and Johansson both giving their best performances to date.
Much like The Squid and the Whale this is a film focused around a divorce, however, almost 15 years from his original break-out film, Baumbach has manged to kindle a different perspective on the tangled affair and comes at it from a vastly different angle. Where we previously saw the divorce through the eyes of an acting-out and troublesome teenage son, we now see it from the parent’s perspective, with next-to no embellishment on the details.
What makes this film both devastating yet comedic is the head-on nature that Baumbach has tackled the story. We get to see the initially amicable divorce begin to turn more and more sour as the couple trade blows in petty arguments and subtle digs, all while vying for their son’s time. The comedy comes from both the situation and the dialogue, with both parties recognising the absurdity of the situation that they find themselves in. It’s a story that showcases the breaking down of a relationship, and then the transformation that follows, as both parties learn more about themselves and their lost love than they ever knew while they were together. This transformation of the character’s relationship takes centre stage and we’re left to see how they discover what they find most important as their emotions are pushed to the limit.
Driver and Johansson really showcase their talent here, with subtleties in their performance that elevate the characters to the projection of what Baumbach intended. This is visualised in an argument where a whole spectrum of emotions are shown in just one sequence. This discussion turned screaming match shows minute details in moments of levity amidst anger that can only come from deep understanding of human relationships, with the writing and direction from Baumbach cast brilliantly in the performance of the actors.
At around the 100 minutes mark there comes an onslaught of emotional hits as the characters start digging deep to take them through the divorce, and finding a growing puddle at your feet by the end wouldn’t be out of place. This is Baumbach’s best feature to date, and will leave you with the strongest bittersweet taste your palate has known.
