It can be very hard to tell a story that has conflicts but no villain. Not all stories have a definite bad guy – life is not that easy – but baddies provide a source of conflict that can be easily analyzed. If one character is in the wrong and the other in the wrong, it is clear who the public should be responsible for, and it is easy to define the terms of a confrontation.
In the new Netflix movie Marriage Story, author and director Noah Baumbach could easily have made his dividing parties into protagonists and antagonists as a divorce couple escalated their relationship conflict to painful extremes. But Baumbach has created his career (The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha, The Meyerowitz Stories) on exploring the gray areas between open right and wrong in personal encounters, and Marriage Story does not refuse to present anything absolute except perhaps that Absolute, that love is strange.
Charlie (Adam Driver) is a theater director and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) is a former film actress who now plays in Charlie’s shows. At the beginning of the film, they read letters in which they describe exactly what they love each other. Their 10-year marriage seems to be perfect – until Baumbach withdraws and reveals that they wrote these letters at the behest of a divorce mediator. The counselor asks her to read her letters, and Nicole refuses, annoyed and embarrassed.
Strangers in a train. Photo: Netflix
The breakup between Nicole and Charlie becomes more complicated when Nicole violates her agreement not to involve lawyers, and her legal representatives mix the details of her life into black and white boxes that they do not really fit. Charlie’s lawyer Bert (Alan Alda) sees the shades of gray; He tells Charlie, “Most of the people in my business are just transacting with them, I like to introduce them as humans.” In this respect, he is similar to Baumbach, but where Baumbach, as a storyteller, has room to be empathetic, Bert does Lawyer not this. Nicole’s lawyer Nora (Laura Dern) sees the divorce as a contest in which Nicole has the absolute right and deserves to win as much as possible in comparison. In order to share custody of her son Henry (Azhy Robertson), Charlie must approach his divorce in the same aggressive, all or nothing way, or at least find a lawyer who does.
This enforced foreclosure is painful to watch, especially as Charlie and Nicole seem to be trying to handle it. Although they say that they do not want to involve Henry, this is inevitable given their life plans. Charlie protests that this is a New Yorker family, while Nicole, who was born in Los Angeles, brought Henry to school in LA while shooting a TV pilot and wants to stay there.
As Nicole and Charlie struggle with their irreconcilable hopes and the increasingly aggressive actions of their respective lawyers, the divorce becomes bitter. No person is shown as wrong. Although the story naturally tends toward sympathy for Charlie by simply burdening him with more problems than Nicole is facing right now, Baumbach never lets Libra down. Whenever Nicole and Charlie are together, the camera never focuses on one of them more than the other. When Baumbach uses a close-up to capture strong emotions in one of his stars, he assigns them to the other’s reactions instead of focusing on a single emotion. And in their time off he follows them evenly.
The whole movie revolves around a sticking point based on this evenness: Charlie and Nicole break up, but they still love each other. The tenderness they feel for each other has not disappeared and they will necessarily remain part of the other’s life. There is no big, dramatic, catalyzing incident that would have led to divorce, as much as a decade of straw on the back of the camel.
A happier memory. Photo: Netflix
Johansson and Driver perfectly capture this sometimes reluctant tenderness which makes it even harder to observe the possible annoyance of their characters. The degree of tenderness they share opens them to equally disgust. And when this bitterness and anger is finally released, Baumbach focuses the camera exactly on the faces of his leads. He has adjusted to this volcano of emotions. While Nicole and Charlie’s outbursts and allegations amaze, it’s also easy to understand why they give in so quickly and forgive each other.
The rest of the cast helps anchor the film, notably Julie Hagerty as Nicole’s mother, who despite Nicole’s protests still wants to be friends with Charlie, and Merritt Wever as Nicole’s sister, who also unhappily deals with Charlie’s extermination from the family. Baumbach does not allow the audience to become so familiar with the characters of Dern and Alda, but they still shape the overall picture of Charlie and Nicole’s divorce with mini-monologues about the nature of the split and their respective views on how to handle it.
A divorce – or the end of a relationship – does not invite to tenderness, or the space, to consider that both sides of a dispute may be wrong and right at the same time. Baumbach, however, takes the time to make room for their opposing points of view and experiences, and he creates a richer film for it. The marriage is beautiful bittersweet. There are no winners or losers in Charlie and Nicole’s breakup and no heroes or villains either. They are all, as Bert says, people.
Marriage Story is now streamed to Netflix.