Marriage Story (2019)
2019
R
137 Minutes
A stage director and an actress struggle through a grueling, coast-to-coast divorce that pushes them to their personal extremes.
User Review
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Tackling a sensitive topic of divorce with such reverence and honest emotion, “Marriage Story”, directed by Noah Baumbach, is a poignant tale about the pain within all people. A often heartbreaking film that transverses that confusing, painful space between separated souls that’s both a pleasure and a harrowing experience to witness.
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The film follows a focused stage director and his actor wife struggling through a grueling, coast-to-coast divorce that pushes them to their personal extremes, while having their son in the middle of it all.
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With remarkable grace, a supple visual style that’s achieved with fantastic framing and shooting on 35mm, and compassion for his characters, director Baumbach showcases divorce as like “death without a body”. Something has been lost. There is grieving, anger, denial. In this moving story, the film captures the insidious nature of divorce, how two well-meaning people will do things they would never think of doing. What partners, who’ve once loved each other so much, in the midst of desolation, will do to protect their own self-interest. How their love is systematically broken down and fractured in the pursuit of monetary gain, control over their children, and the cold, ruthless separation of friendship. Opening up with each of the characters reading a piece they wrote for a mediator that highlights the strengths of their partners and you begin to learn a little of their personality, their anguish is lesser, but the midst of lawyers and outside forces, it expands fruitlessly as they find more reasons to be petty. This shattered dynamic that has no hero or villain laced in is what drives the narrative to immeasurable emotional heights, with actors Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson offering up the performance of their careers with complexing emotions in the pursuit of observing one household becoming two, a child learning to ask about mom and dad as separate people, each with their own ideas and pains.
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“Marriage Story” wonderfully and painfully presents the trials and tribulations of an marriage and the horrors of a divorce with such elegant, human grace. Displayed with compassion and a great understanding of human fallibility, the film unpacks it’s baggage by crafting an intimate, often heart wrenching film that makes the pain of truly irreconcilable difference all the bitterer.1 member likes this review.
