Netflix Review - Marriage Story (15)

Getting divorced with a kid is one of the hardest things to do. It's like a death without a body.

The Gist: Noah Baumbach wrote and directed Marriage Story, the melancholy tale of theatre director Charlie (Adam Driver) and his actor wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), as they negotiate the trauma of ending their once passionately close marriage. At the centre of the drama is the couple's eight-year-old son Henry, who travels with mom from the couple's New York home, when she shoots a TV pilot in Los Angeles, turning custody into a major issue. Mediation turns into the hiring of divorce lawyers, at which point the relatively cordial proceedings take a turn for the nasty. There's only so long the mutual sense of hurt can simmer, before it reaches boiling, with Henry caught in the middle.

The Juice: Baumbach has form dealing with marital dysfunction - in his 2005 film The Squid and the Whale Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney exchanged vicious barbs as their domestic harmony went horribly sour. Marriage Story is similarly tragi-comic, but demonstrates a greater sense of compassion in a screenplay that is frequently hilarious, occasionally devastating and never less than painfully real. Every character interaction is acutely observed, never better than in a scene of painful comic embarrassment when Nicole's family - who adore Charlie - are co-opted into helping serve the divorce papers. 

A fine balance of sympathy is achieved throughout this Story, with both Johansson and Driver delivering awards-worthy turns that reek of buried emotional turmoil. (That's until they give vent to said turmoil in one of the year's most unforgettably fraught scenes.) The support is sturdy as well, with Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta all playing the scenes of legal wrangling to honed (and sometimes dryly comic) perfection. The precise and unfussy direction is there to compliment performances; the camera lingers on Johansson as she lets the details of her marriage spill to lawyer Dern, or on Driver as he deals with a supremely awkward 'observation' of time spent with his son. And in one telling legal-hearing scene both parties are framed as peripheral to the procedure that's been set in motion.

The Judgement: 8.5/10. The most obvious comparison here is Kramer vs. Kramer. Marriage Story, however, updates the premise by sustaining equal focus on both partners and by delving deep into the effect of the unfolding crisis on each. It'll cut close to the bone for a lot of viewers, but the excruciating aspects are eased by wit, wisdom and empathy - for characters whose only real crime is being fallibly human. With its broken heart on its sleeve, this is as good and as moving a drama as you'll see this year.