Marriage Story (2019) Review

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 have 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.

The 9 is for a film whose subject is a procedure instead of a conflict. Nicole and Charlie do not 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, which is 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 will not read hers out loud, which 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 is self-sufficient, is competitive, and cries easily at films, and the specificity is what tells the audience these two people genuinely 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.

The Process Does the Damage

Neither party wants lawyers. Both hire them. Once that happens, each is required by their own representation to make claims about the other they do not believe.

That is the film’s actual subject and it is unusual. The conflict is not between two people, it is between two people and a system that converts a disagreement into an adversarial proceeding with incentives of its own.

The mechanism is shown precisely. A lawyer explains that if she does not 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, is handled by somebody’s relative, 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 is 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 is 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 is saying it because it will work, and the film does not resolve which is doing the work.

Dern also plays her as somebody who likes Nicole, which is the detail that makes the scene land. Nora is not cynical and she is not disinterested either, and both of those are true while she is doing professional damage.

Alan Alda’s Bert is the alternative. He is 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 is small, is shared, has files on the floor, and Charlie’s decision to leave him is made legible by a single shot of where the man works.

Ray Liotta’s Jay is the escalation. He is expensive, aggressive, and effective, and Charlie hires him because Bert lost, which is the film demonstrating that the system rewards the party willing to escalate.

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 has punched a wall and she is on the floor.

The apartment is also borrowed and nearly empty, which is 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, which is why the escalation reads as continuous. A scene assembled from coverage would have had visible joins at every change of temperature.

The recovery is the part people forget. He apologizes immediately, is devastated, and she comforts him, and the film’s position is that the argument was produced by the situation and not by either of them.

2019 and Parasite

Best Picture went to Parasite, which is 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 being made, 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, which is the same profile The Insider had twenty years earlier.

Randy Newman’s score is also worth naming and lost. It is warm, orchestral and entirely out of step with the subject, which is the decision that keeps the film from becoming a procedural about lawyers.

Should you watch Marriage Story?

Yes, and the opening six minutes are worth studying on their own. Two people who never stop liking each other, a legal process that requires 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.

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