Marriage Story Review (2019) | Full Analysis with Spoilers

Marriage Story movie is so powerful and incredibly sad, it leaves you in a pool of tears. You walk out teary-eyed witnessing this despairing experience unfold that leaves you scarred, charred just like a real relationship would if it were to uproot you from your comfort zone and bash you against the wall.

The movie is a downhill race of thoughts, so close to the truth that watching it up close makes you realize how ugly our lives are, how every fragment of it is riddled with lies we feed ourselves, and how we are forever headed toward a surefire hazard as we try to unroll into better lives.

As I regurgitate this flick now, I register again, what an outstanding piece of work it is. I have cried even while talking about it. It shatters you emotionally and drains you out utterly. If a movie could do that to you, I think it deserves all the accolades there are.

The Direction of Marriage Story Movie

Written and directed by Noah Baumbach, another sad soul who sees the world for what it is. A lot of bits in the movie seem dispersed from his personal life, and you can see how it might have ended up affecting him. His breakup from Jennifer Jason Leigh feels like a lens he used to write and direct this one, even though they both claim it wasn’t. Still, it ends up being absolutely phenomenal.

The movie feels like a personal ride he takes you on, as you feel the very angst of people who get their strings cut from each other after doing a married time. He has framed all the agitation that an exercise like divorce brings in one’s life.

Noah takes you through those deeply engraved stories holed up inside the cavernous tunnels of his brain, and you ride shotgun.

He unspools his thoughts by doing some thorough research on all the shades that divorce brings.

Noah’s direction hits you on a personal level. It messes with your chords on so many occasions proving why he is a drama polymath. He creates situations that elicit compassion, puts you in the shoes of the protagonist, and lets his work hit you hard.

He does long monologues, dialogues, and musicals to make a valid dramatic point that comes out quite vehemently. There are breadcrumbs that Noah wants us to see, and if you pay attention to them you realize the very futility of the spoken word. How humans have a tendency to become hypocrites when they are put in a certain situation, or when they are badly trying to win. It’s a work of art well crafted.

Adam Driver as Charlie (Spoilers)

Complementing the genius is another prodigy in the form of Adam Driver. What an exceptional actor! He takes the role of Charlie and epitomizes the angst of the director who is juggling two worlds.

For a guy who has bigger things to worry about, walks into divorce – a crazy ride that is about to overturn his life.

It seems as if he is picked up from something he wasn’t really concerned about and moved to something he didn’t totally understand. He was suddenly fighting a war he was least interested in, for he had far more important things to do. It was as if he was given a sword and asked to fight an army. Well, he is just a bus driver from Paterson for crying out loud. Couldn’t help the reference!

The whole scene has been so beautifully created it makes you wonder how life has this bizarre wont of barging in with its nuances at peaceful times.

Charlie is taken aback by the divorce papers, which are hammered in like reality.

I feel like I’m in a dream.

It hits him hard but he has his work to focus on. He has big things happening for him workwise. However, the divorce sneaks into his life and tries to make itself a priority.

Watching him getting smacked between the two, as his wife goes on to get an upper hand by using one of the best lawyers, is just sad. He witnesses the ugly aftermath of a failed marriage as he tries to bring all the crumbs together.

One moment Charlie had thought they had an understanding between them that even falling out of love couldn’t affect, the next it was a downhill ride where even normal talks were turned into weapons against each other in court.

Adam Driver gives a phenomenal performance as Charlie where you end up feeling for the poor chap who is trying to wrap his head around a situation he does not have control over. He tears you up on so many occasions, hard not to empathize with him even as you see how things are, in fact, in no one’s jurisdiction.

The Positives of Charlie

Noah starts the movie on a very positive note, wherein he depicts a world through a montage of frames and a narrative spoken by their counterparts. It focuses on all the love. All those positives not only cleverly drop a hint about their lives, but also set a backdrop for an imperative plot point.

Noah throws in a vantage from a babysitter to showcase how great they looked as a couple from a third-person perspective.

God, you guys are so attractive. Shit. Sorry, I didn’t stop that from being said.

That is about the outward appearance of things. The inside story was downright chaos. He was preparing us for it, of what was about to come, all the broken things waiting to lance your feet.

Here are some of the lines that brilliantly described Charlie’s character from the letter Nicole wrote:

Charlie is undaunted. He never lets other people’s opinions or any setbacks keep him from what he wants to do.

He cries easily in movies.

He rarely gets defeated, which I feel like I always do.

He disappears into his own world.

He loves being a dad. He loves all the things you are supposed to hate, like the tantrums, the waking up at night. It’s almost annoying how much he likes it, but… then, it’s mostly nice.

Charlie takes all of my moods steadily. He doesn’t give in to them or make me feel bad about them.

Scarlett Johansson as Nicole

Rarely a movie does justice to both its characters while manifesting heartbreak. Noah is such a good person he directs the persona of Scarlett Johansson in a very positive light too.

Her Nicole is an ambitious woman who is trying to get back to her roots, trying to feel what she used to when times were good. She has a lot of time to mull over what went wrong which comes out in a spectacular fashion in the form of a long crisp performance when she spills her heart out in front of her lawyer Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern).

I never really came alive for myself; I was only feeding his aliveness.

Those are words rarely spoken out, but she finally gets to spew it all confiding in the lawyer who, by the way, is someone who really listens.

Her mind is obsessed with getting her life together, getting it back. The way the sun used to shine on her face, she wanted to feel that again. She wanted to be home where she felt she had a voice. With Charlie, she had been feeling muffled, voiceless.

And there’s nothing wrong in wanting that. There were discussions aplenty on her desire to move to LA which Charlie never took seriously. Charlie’s future was in New York where he was slowly building something up. But Nicole’s dream got sidelined and the whole plan to do LA ended up becoming just a thing they had once talked about.

The Positives of Nicole

Just like there were positives of Charlie, there were many that were listed for even Nicole at the very beginning of the movie. There were some great lines:

She makes people feel comfortable about even embarrassing things.

She really listens when someone is talking. Sometimes she listens too much for too long.

She always knows the right thing to do when it comes to difficult family shit.

And it’s not easy for her to put away a sock, or close a cabinet, or do a dish, but she tries for me.

Nicole gives great presents.

She is a mother who plays, really plays. She never steps off playing or says it’s too much. And it must be too much some of the time.

She keeps the fridge over-full. No one is ever hungry in our house.

She could have stayed in LA and been a movie star, but she gave that up to do theater with me in New York.

I get stuck in my ways, and she knows when to push me and when to leave me alone.

My crazy ideas are her favorite things to figure out how to execute.

The Divorce Lawyers Story of Marriage

It’s an ugly world to witness once divorce lawyers come into the equation. When they get involved, things tend to become dirty. For then it becomes a competition to score as many things as possible from a sinking ship.

Criminal lawyers see bad people at their best, divorce lawyers see good people at their worst.

Laura Dern makes some serious points in her act as Nora Fanshaw. She hammers so many lines down your head even as she manages to keep a happy face delivering them.

She basically does her job, but still ends up playing a villain in Charlie’s life.

So it’s a deal when it’s something you want. And a discussion when Nicole wants it?

Her soliloquy at one point couldn’t be more perfect:

People don’t accept mothers who drink too much wine and yell at their child and call him an asshole. I get it. I do it too. We can accept an imperfect dad. Let’s face it, the idea of a good father was only invented like 30 years ago. Before that, fathers were expected to be silent and absent and unreliable and selfish, and can all say we want them to be different. But on some basic level, we accept them. We love them for their fallibilities, but people absolutely don’t accept those same failings in mothers. We don’t accept it structurally and we don’t accept it spiritually. Because the basis of our Judeo-Christian whatever is Mary, Mother of Jesus, and she’s perfect. She’s a virgin who gives birth, unwaveringly supports her child and holds his dead body when he’s gone. And the dad isn’t there. He didn’t even do the fucking. God is in heaven. God is the father and God didn’t show up. So, you have to be perfect, and Charlie can be a fuck up and it doesn’t matter. You will always be held to a different, higher standard. And it’s fucked up, but that’s the way it is.

If you come to think of it, a failed marriage is like a breakup only worse! When there is a kid involved, it’s the sharing shenanigans that turn monsters out of people.

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

The Main Fight in Marriage Story

The thing about Marriage Story movie is that both the characters are good people. When a bad thing happens to good people, you cannot really take sides. Both were responsible for their common debacle.

She’s competitive.

There were so many unsaid words between them that it gradually started becoming a suitcase of contempt only to be spilled almost all at once.

Such an instance happens in their lives when they finally decide to go at each other with everything they had got. It is one of the best scenes in the movie where we see Charlie and Nicole shattering to pieces, apologizing for saying mean things to each other.

Every day I wake up and I hope you’re dead! Dead, like if I could guarantee Henry would be okay, I’d hope you’d get an illness and then get hit by a car and die!

All that stuff that gets said between them makes you ponder how we tend to become animals when we fight. How could there exist a thing that can reduce us to become so inhuman that we forget all restraints? Emotions go really high as you can’t really stop yourself from crying at that juncture.

He’s very competitive.

When words don’t get spoken for a really long time, they tend to spew out and blow out of proportion. However, the constructive thing to take from there is that they finally get to come out in the open.

The cheating gets addressed for the first time, which is like a major hole in his conscience, but with the explanation that he gives, it suddenly somehow feels less of an issue.

You shouldn’t be upset that I fucked her. You should be upset that I had a laugh with her!

Charlie is so keen on proving he is a good parent that he overlooks a terrible nervous cut on his hand. That’s one of those scenes that makes you feel really bad for him. Then the part where Charlie goes on a long warbling spree after the divorce in a club as opposed to a happy Nicole singing and dancing at her home is very deep as well.

Thought-Provoking Scenes

There are other scenes too in Marriage story that fling you away on a slingshot. Moments like how Nicole used to complain that she felt she did not have her own taste, that everything in the house was Charlie’s choice, that her voice didn’t matter, but then there’s a scene where Charlie doesn’t know what to order and she takes the menu and orders for him.

You are forced to wonder how well does she know him that she does all the ordering for him. Charlie doesn’t even know what he is supposed to have. Nicole played a major part in his life. It is just contradictory to what she states about not having anything of her own. That’s one big part – making all the decisions for him. She owned that already!

But all the minutiae of their daily routine gets overlooked. If only someone were to show the import of her in his life, the divorce wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

She is vital to his survival, completing him wherever necessary. As is once again observed in the last section, where she has pity on Charlie and allows him to have their son for the night even though it was her night. We see him being stopped as she ties his lace, and it breaks your heart watching how difficult it would be for Charlie now that Nicole is out of his life.

Another moment that slams you against the wall lies in the final juncture where Charlie returns to a stranger in Nicole’s life. Charlie had moved to LA for a while, on which the whole divorce was based upon. The sheer knowledge breaks your heart.

Then to bring down the rain, their kid starts reading the letter Nicole had written for Charlie, and that final line is like a stab in the gut.

I fell in love with him two seconds after I saw him. And I’ll never stop loving him, even though it doesn’t make sense anymore.

Watching him cry swells your heart up. We see a silhouette of Nicole in the backdrop and you can only imagine the pain.

You can order the original score of Marriage Story by Randy Newman from here:

The Final Verdict – Story of Marriage

All movies are lies, but some are so close to the truth that they make themselves go really hard on you. Marriage Story takes you to a whole new level of thinking, where you are lost in a discussion with circumstances, thinking about all the sacrifices you make, and how in a perfect world, it never plays out.

For me on a personal level, I used to think to truly shatter into pieces, you need a backdrop to relate to the story on hand. Marriage Story proves me wrong. Even though it was a life unlived, the chemistry that at one point could have felt absent, it was brimmed alive using writing good things about each other in the very beginning and that was enough.

Marriage Story is more of a divorce story where people are trying to get back to each other using lawyers, at the same time trying to make sense of what remains. It is nothing but a train wreck of happily ever afters.

A definite watch if you deliberately want a tear-jerker or have gone through something similar. Or even if you haven’t and want to empathize with this wonderful creation, just go for it!

Check out the trailer of Marriage Story here: