New record for screenwriter and director Noah Baumbach – Variety

It is Nicole who is at the origin of the split. This is an actress, raised in Los Angeles, who had an indie moment in It Girl (she starred in a trendy sexy romance titled "All Over the Girl"), and then, after falling in love with Charlie, s & rsquo; Is settled in New York to marry him. and become the star of his experimental theater company downtown. They were in their twenties, talented and successful, and once their son was born, they started a good life at Park Slope. As for Charlie, he lives his dream. But Nicole had periodic emotions about moving to LA, which Charlie "discussed" but never took seriously. It's because he's a guy from New York. In addition, his troupe is based in New York and directs the shows, including an "Electra" that goes to Broadway. How could they possibly move?

Nicole, however, now has the chance to play in a television pilot that could lead to a series. And what she does realize is that, even though she loves her family, she spent her marriage in Charlie's dream and suspended her forever. Of course, there are ways to resolve this type of conflict. This is the reason why the growth difficulties of a good marriage are. But Baumbach has understood how taste, personality and the ego can be a major obstacle. There is a moment when Charlie, the avant-garde dynamo, reminds Nicole that he does not watch television, while the film takes a look at the film "cool" that he looks at the place. This is the kind of male credibility distinction that means everything and nothing – but in this case, it means more than Charlie knows, since his dismissal from "television" includes a sharp reduction in the centrality of Nicole's career. .

It's old New York-vs.-LA. the debate on values, the mythological one of "Annie Hall", only the way this is happening in "Marriage Story" is much more heartbreaking. Nicole, convinced that Charlie loves everything at home except for the desires that challenge him, goes to L.A. to shoot down his pilot. She takes Henry to his mother, Sandra (Julie Hagerty), herself a former television actress. There is no debate on whether the divorce is ongoing; it's running.

But it is here that the drama begins. Charlie still does not understand. He accepts that his marriage is over and he and Nicole, who are not wealthy (he channels the money that they bring back into the theater troupe), agree not to embark on a war for division booty. Everything is fine. But Charlie still thinks he's a "New York family". He is not a bad guy, but he is so self-directed that even in the case of divorce, he thinks he has a version of life he had lived before. They will live a few streets apart from each other and share Henry's guard!

But that's not the way it works. Divorces are infamous for money-money quarrels, but what happens when you have a child and a parent wants to live across the country? How do you divide this? Charlie drags Nicole to Los Angeles and what he learned, as soon as she hired divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), is that he lived the life he led and that there was a world of divorce in which appearance became reality. The system does not listen to your desires and lawyers charge bankruptcy fees such that, as soon as you entered the battle, you lost the war.

At least that's how Charlie sees it. All he tries to do is maintain his bond with his son and he feels like a criminal. (The fact that Henry love L.A., as well as trendy items such as socks, were not included in Charlie's plans.) Every divorce has two aspects, and in "Marriage Story," Baumbach shares our sympathy in the most ingenious way. From Charlie's point of view, more than half of the two-hour, 16-minute drama is told. It seems that divorce is happening to him. And as Adam Driver is an extremely likeable actor, we can feel, while Charlie is buried under circumstances beyond his control, that we are "on his side".

But Baumbach is peeling the truth of this marriage, layer by layer. And we start to see that Charlie, despite all his affection and intelligence, does not know what he does not know. The scene in which Nicole de Johansson tells the story of their marriage to her lawyer is a breathtaking feat. The action she has taken is perhaps brutal, but it's just for her. It's a movie about New York vs. L.A. This is really the battle between 20th century creative worship and the 21st century reality that women have many more choices than they have ever experienced.

It's also how the system Divorce, as it works now, can be a big fucking show. Charlie learns that he is not allowed to hire a lawyer that his wife has consulted even once (and she has had a ton). He learns that the court will expect him to have a house in LA (lest he be seen as an abandoned visitor), but once he rents an apartment in that apartment, that does not matter. only strengthen the case to say that it is a family based in LA. damned if you do it …He finds a lawyer from the schlubby family (Alan Alda), who basically tells him to reduce his losses, then hires his own lawyer (950 USD / hour) (Ray Liotta). When Liotta's rude bulldog and Dern's fair Valkyrie justice clash in court, we hear the raw facts of the couple's life twisted into the most distorted forms.

Yet one of the powerful subtleties of "Marriage Story" is that the divorce process, however flawed, becomes the means by which Charlie and Nicole confront the underlying reality of their marriage. They go to court and disfigure themselves to solve a problem that Charlie, if he was a different man, could have solved in two minutes.

The brilliant scenario of Baumbach never weakens and does not strike on a false note. He has developed intelligent, witty, saddened and searching characters whose ability to express their feelings is never so realistic, and he writes scenes that resemble verbal arias. When Nicole shows up at the generic apartment that Charlie has rented, both try to "fix the problem," but then they go down into a raw accusation area (You're a slob! You you're a dictator! You used me for your career! You slept with this director!), the dialogue resembles that of Bergman in the overdrive of the media age, and Johansson and Driver deliver it with a such anger that the scene hurts you, fascinates you and makes you cry.

Supporting actors, in their own way, are all equally memorable, from Dern's feminist iron-clad militant (her talk about why there will always be different expectations of mothers and fathers is a recurring classic) at Liotta's right-hand shooter at Mary Hollis Inboden stole the scene as a family court appraiser and in an espionage case so destabilized that as she walked out the door to try to Charlie's ability to be a father, she defends all that is insufficient in the divorce process. (She manages to cap off the movie's most delightful joke, that everyone – even an evaluator intervening in a custody hearing about where Henry should live – recommends to LA the "space" reflex ".)

Late in the film, two scenes are built around the songs of Stephen Sondheim of the great company of 1970, "Company". "You could make a person crazy" is played by Nicole, her mother and sister at a party, while Charlie plays "Being Alive" in a piano bar after work. They add to a yin-yang haunted by male and female perception. The nostalgic performance of the pilot "Being Alive" could almost defeat anyone's point of view on marriage. However, marriage, although it may seem to those of us who love it as the difference between being alive and being nowhere, is not always enough. "Marriage Story" captures this truth with such an exquisite combination of love and sorrow that it leaves you heartbroken and delighted.