Monday Movie Review: Marriage Story
Yikes. This is an interesting one. But once again, I seem to find myself feeling really meh about a movie everyone else is raving about. Such is life.
Marriage Story (probably should have been titled Divorce Story) is about Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) who are in the middle of what turns out to be a kind of nasty divorce. Charlie runs a theater company in New York, and Nicole is an actress who just moved home to LA to shoot a TV show. When Nicole hires a killer divorce attorney, what starts as a seemingly amicable split turns into a mud-slinging and expensive process. Nicole and Charlie have some pretty ugly fights, mostly about the custody of their kid, but also about money and who did what for whom. In the end, they seem to settle on what they each wanted in the beginning, only now they’ve spent thousands of dollars and said horrible things to each other.
Scarlett and Adam both received Golden Globe noms for this film, which is getting lots of praise, but honestly, they are the least entertaining parts of this movie. Laura Dern as Nora, Nicole’s lawyer, is absolute gold. Julie Hagerty and Merritt Wever as Nicole’s mom and sister, respectively, also turn in hilarious and heartfelt performances. But honestly, to me, the scenes with Scarlett and Adam felt like Acting 101 level reactions. Everything was predictable, nothing felt remotely life-like. Given the movie was written and directed by Noah Baumbach and “loosely” based on his divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, I think we’re supposed to feel bad for Charlie, but I didn’t at all. Honestly, I didn’t really feel bad for either of them, but I was definitely more sympathetic to Nicole as she sacrificed her career so Charlie could succeed and in the end received absolutely nothing for it.
If you’ve seen the musical The Last Five Years, Marriage Story is definitely reminiscent of the theatrical production (also a movie starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan). And at least with that one, you’ve got some musical numbers to keep you entertained. If it weren’t for the supporting cast of Marriage Story, I probably would have stopped watching. I don’t think anything about the two main performances, the story, or the directing was anything close to unique or ground-breaking.
Overall, it gets a B- from me.
