Marriage Story (2019) * * *

Directed by:  Noah Baumbach

Starring:  Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, Julie Hagerty, Azhy Robertson, Wallace Shawn

We hear in voiceover narration and witness in montages what Charlie (Driver) and Nicole (Johansson), married for a dozen years or so, love about one another.    They speak so glowingly that we think this is an ideal marriage, but we soon discover they are headed for divorce.    The list of things they write is part of a couples therapy assignment, and Nicole refuses to read hers aloud.    Charlie and Nicole don't want to involve lawyers in their divorce.    They delude themselves into thinking it will be amicable all the way down the line.    Once Nicole moves with their son Henry (Robertson) to L.A. and Charlie stays in New York, the amicability flies out the window.

Noah Bambauch's Marriage Story could've easily been called Divorce Story, since the bulk of the story focuses on Charlie's and Nicole's split.    It is dramedy, to be sure, and some of the material is paced and spoken in ways which would make Woody Allen proud.    At two hours plus, there are superfluous scenes which slow things down, but Marriage Story is grounded with relatable, vulnerable performances by Driver and Johansson.    Each person has strengths, weaknesses, and long-held resentments which took a while to bubble to the surface.   

Nicole was once a teen actress who moved with Charlie to New York to work in his fledgling theater company.    He is meticulous in his direction of a play, how he cooks dinner, and how he keeps his home.    Nicole doesn't mind leaving a bra lying around and leaving the apartment a little messy once in a while.  Through the years, she feels she has allowed herself to lose her own voice in the marriage.  Charlie has a way of getting what he wants, until one day he doesn't.   Despite their deal to divorce without contention, Nicole hires hardball divorce attorney Nora Fanshaw (Dern) after gentle persuasion from her mother (Hagerty).   Charlie responds in kind by hiring the less aggressive Bert Spitz (Alda) and then his own pit bull lawyer (Liotta), who is expensive but willing to go low blow for low blow with Nora.

Besides the leads, there is excellent supporting work from Dern, Alda, Liotta, and Shawn, an actor in Charlie's company who advises him to get laid as much as possible now that he's divorcing.    There is a critical scene, maybe even Marriage Story's best, in which Nicole and Charlie start out with a superficial conversation which disintegrates into shouting, accusations, and crying.   The pent-up anger toward each other comes spewing forth like spitting lava from an erupting volcano, and there's no stopping it.    We now know this marriage can't be saved, and it is sad.

Baumbach made 2005's The Squid and the Whale, which semi-autobiographically depicted his parents' divorce.    They too deluded themselves into thinking they could be friendly with each other and cool about each dating other people.    That didn't work, no more than Nicole's and Charlie's futile attempts at civility.    Now, Marriage Story mirrors his own divorce, and it is told with insight and knowledge he wishes he didn't have to go through such pain to obtain.