Marriage Story (2019) Review
9/10
A man describes his wife. A woman describes her husband. Both accounts are specific, affectionate and accurate. Then a mediator asks them to read what they’ve written aloud and she refuses, and the film has told you its entire method in six minutes.
The lists are also asymmetric in a way the film uses later. Hers is longer and more observant, his is warmer and less precise, and by the end the audience has been given a reason to read that difference as significant.
Marriage Story wrecks me, and it does it without a villain. I like both of these people from the first minute, and the film makes me watch a system push them into hurting each other anyway. I find that harder to sit through than any story with a real bad guy, and it’s the reason the 9 feels right.
The 9 is for a film whose subject is a procedure instead of a conflict. Nicole and Charlie don’t stop liking each other at any point, and the damage is done by a process that requires each of them to make the worst available case about the other. Laura Dern won Supporting Actress and the film lost everything else, including Best Picture to Parasite. It’s the one loss on this page nobody argues with.
The Opening Is the Whole Film
Six minutes of two voiceovers over footage of a family working, with each partner listing what they value in the other, delivered warmly and in detail.
Then the reveal. These are mediation exercises, the marriage is over, and she won’t read hers out loud. That converts everything the audience just heard into evidence of what is being lost.
That structure is the most efficient opening I can think of in a recent film. It supplies the entire relationship, establishes both characters, and reframes itself in a single cut. The device also returns. Nicole’s list is read at the end, in her own voice, over an image of him, and the film has held it for two hours to use once.
The reverse list does the same job. He’s self-sufficient, is competitive, and cries easily at films, and the specificity is what tells the audience these two people knew each other.
The songs at the end work the same way from two directions. Each performs a number from Company in a different city, his in a bar with friends and hers on a stage, and the film uses a musical about the difficulty of being married to close out a film about the ending of one particular marriage in it.
Establish what’s being lost before you establish the loss. Six minutes of specific affection makes the following two hours expensive, and the reverse order makes them procedural. The reframe is the technique. Present something warmly, then reveal the context that makes it painful, and the reader re-reads it involuntarily.
Hold a planted element for the whole work and spend it once. The list returns at the end and the delay gives it force.
Specificity makes affection credible. Not that she’s kind, but that she cuts his hair, listens to people, and is a great dancer.
The Process Does the Damage
Neither party wants lawyers. Both hire them. Once that happens, their own representation requires each to make claims about the other they don’t believe. That’s the film’s actual subject and it’s unusual. The fight is between two people and a system that converts a disagreement into an adversarial proceeding with incentives of its own. I think that’s the smartest choice in the script, because it lets me keep liking both of them while the damage piles up.
The mechanism is shown clearly. A lawyer explains that if she doesn’t file in Los Angeles, the case goes to New York and she loses her position, so a decision about where to live becomes a strategic filing. Nobody decided to have a custody fight. A jurisdictional question produced one. The service of papers is the sharpest single scene of the mechanism. It happens at a family gathering, somebody’s relative handles it, and the film shows a legal instrument arriving in a living room in front of a child. The knife trick is the other clean example. Charlie performs it to prove normality for an observer, gets it wrong, cuts himself, and spends the rest of the scene hiding a bleeding arm while continuing to be assessed as a parent.
The deposition and the evaluation are the film’s clearest sequences. A court-appointed observer sits in an apartment while a father performs normality, and the artificiality of the performance is what produces the accident.
Martha Kelly plays the evaluator and the casting is precise. She’s pleasant, is taking notes, offers nothing, and the scene’s discomfort comes entirely from a person being agreeable while assessing whether somebody should keep their son.
The Lawyers
Laura Dern’s Nora is charming, effective, entirely on her client’s side, and delivers a monologue about the impossibility of the expectations placed on mothers that’s both correct and a piece of professional advocacy.
That double reading is the best writing in the film. Everything Nora says is true, and she’s saying it because it’ll work, and the film doesn’t resolve which motive drives her.
Dern also plays her as somebody who likes Nicole. It’s the detail that makes the scene work. Nora isn’t cynical and she’s not disinterested either, and both of those are true while she’s doing professional damage. Dern is a joy to watch here, and I think the Oscar was deserved. She’s warm and funny and lethal, and I couldn’t tell you whether I like Nora or fear her. The film wants me to feel both, and Dern makes that easy. Alan Alda’s Bert is the alternative. He’s gentle, cheap, tells Charlie the process is a negotiation instead of a war, and is thoroughly out-lawyered, and the film is clear that his decency costs his client. His office is the detail that establishes him. It’s small, is shared, has files on the floor, and a single shot of where the man works makes Charlie’s decision to leave him legible.
Ray Liotta’s Jay is the escalation. He’s expensive, aggressive, and effective, and Charlie hires him because Bert lost. That’s the film showing that the system rewards the party willing to escalate.
Give your most persuasive speech to somebody with a professional interest in persuading. The reader can’t separate the truth from the tactic, and that irresolution is more durable than either. The failure mode is a speech that’s only true. It reads as the author speaking. Show the decent option losing. If restraint were viable, the escalation would be a character flaw, and this film establishes it as the only available strategy.
An institution with incentives is a stronger antagonist than a person with motives. Nobody in this film wants what happens. The costs are also specific. The film names figures, states what the retainers are, and establishes that Charlie is paying for the proceeding out of a MacArthur grant. That turns the argument into arithmetic.
The Argument
The film’s most discussed scene is an argument in an empty apartment that runs about eight minutes and escalates from a discussion about scheduling to the worst thing either of them has ever said. What makes it work is the staging. It begins calmly, both parties are trying to be reasonable, and the escalation is incremental with each step being a response to the previous one instead of a decision.
The choreography matters as much as the dialogue. They move through the apartment, sit down, stand up, and the physical arrangement changes with the temperature, and by the end he’s punched a wall and she’s on the floor. The apartment is also borrowed and nearly empty. That’s the choice that makes the scene possible. No possessions, no furniture to speak of, nothing to be careful of, and two people in a space with no reason to lower their voices.
Both actors have said it was shot over a small number of long takes across two days. That’s why the escalation reads as continuous. A scene assembled from coverage would have had visible joins at every change of temperature.
People forget the recovery, and it’s the part that breaks me.
He apologizes immediately and is devastated, and she comforts him. The film’s position is that the situation produced the argument, and after those eight minutes I believe it. I’d point anyone who calls this film cold to that moment on the floor.
2019 and Parasite
Best Picture went to Parasite. It’s the correct outcome and the only entry on this page where the film that won was better than the film that should have.
This appears here because of the Best Actress category. Scarlett Johansson lost to Renee Zellweger for Judy, which is the argument I’m making, and Johansson was nominated twice that year.
The comparison is the standard one. Zellweger’s Judy Garland is a transformation performance in a slight film, and Johansson’s Nicole is a woman inside a process, and the Academy has a long and documented preference for the first.
Driver also lost Best Actor to Joaquin Phoenix for Joker, and Dern’s win is the film’s only award from six nominations. That’s the same profile The Insider had twenty years earlier.
Randy Newman’s score is also worth naming and lost. It’s warm, orchestral and entirely out of step with the subject. That’s the decision that keeps the film from becoming a procedural about lawyers.
I adore that score. It sounds like it belongs to a gentler movie, and the mismatch keeps reminding me these two people used to be happy.
A transformation performance is legible and a performance of ordinary behavior isn’t. The first is rewarded and the second is harder. Nothing about this is fixable, so know which one you’re asking a reader to notice. A page arguing that winners should have lost is strongest when it admits the cases where the winner was right. Parasite belongs where it is. Six nominations and one win is a familiar profile. It means a work everybody respected, in a year when something else was the event. Parasite took Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and International Film, which is a sweep, and any film in that category was going to end the night with one award or none.
Should you watch Marriage Story?
Yes, and the opening six minutes are worth studying on their own. It’s a 9 because it gives me two people who never stop liking each other, a legal process that forces each to make the worst available case about the other, and a list of what she loved about him that the film holds for two hours and spends once. I’d sit through that apartment argument again just to watch two actors this good refuse to let each other off the hook.
