Pleasure meets pain in Marriage Story
REVIEWS MARRIAGE STORY
Starring Adam Driver. Rating unavailable
➧ MARRIAGE STORY
is an obvious passion project for Noah Baumbach, who has focused on fragmented families (resembling his own), from The Squid and the Whale to his recent
Netflix outing, The Meyerowitz Stories. Here, he boils marital life down to Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as Charlie and Nicole, a New York couple with everything going for them—it seems.
Charlie’s a successful experimental-theatre director about to make his Broadway debut with a modernist version of Elektra. (Talk about daddy issues!) And Hollywood is headhunting Nicole, his muse and rising star. They have a cute, not overly precocious eight-year-old son (Azhy Robertson) they both dote on. And when we meet the couple, each reads long, highly detailed descriptions of what they most love about each other. Unfortunately, these letters are part of the divorce mediation they’re going through.
Rather than show us what led up to their untimely split, Baumbach moves forward, through Nicole’s relocation to Los Angeles, to work on a sci-fi series, with both parties caught up in separation woes usually reserved for the very wealthy. She hooks up with a go-for-the-throat divorce lawyer, played by Laura Dern, who appears to have driven down from the Santa Barbara of Big
Little Lies. Charlie feels pushed to find his own shark—Ray Liotta, so what could go wrong?—although he settles for a more humanistic type (Alan Alda).
The split is almost as tough on friends and family, with Nicole’s mother (Airplane’s Julie Hagerty, in a terrific screen return) having a particularly hard time picking sides. This may sound like anguished stuff, but while the stars provide enough searing emotion to moisten even the driest eyes, Baumbach finds raucous humour and wry insight throughout. Happily for the two-and-a-quarter-hour running time, he keeps a sharp eye on entertainment value. Near the end, both parties—still on opposite coasts— perform one-take, complete songs from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. Nicole’s is with her family; Charlie does his alone.
In the end, there’s a sense that this
Story is weighted towards Charlie’s POV, especially when you know that it covers some terrain of Baumbach’s own rough break with Jennifer Jason Leigh, with notable ellipses. But Johansson, at her mature best, doesn’t let anyone else totally dominate the proceedings. Her essential truthfulness, like the movie itself, gets under your skin.
DARK WATERS
Starring Mark Ruffalo. Rated PG
➧ MORE THAN THE
waters are dark in this timely, meaningful, but ultimately soft-landing environmental drama. For some reason, director Todd Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman (who helped him achieve stylish greatness in
Carol and Far From Heaven, and did the same for Steven Soderbergh in the similarly themed Erin Brockovich) couldn’t be bothered to turn on the lights for this one.
Superficially, it’s appropriate that a fact-based tale bent on illuminating dirty secrets DuPont kept from the public for eight decades be shot through a lens bleakly. There’s no sun in the skies of 1998 West Virginia, scene of devastating pollution, and Cincinnati, Ohio, home of Robert Bilott, the corporate lawyer played well by Mark Ruffalo (who also helped produce). And things
look even grimmer on the farmstead of the perfectly named Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), who has lost his livestock and more to the seeping landfill next door.
Bilott’s outfit specializes in defending chemical companies, but he reluctantly takes Tennant’s case, with ambivalent support from his silver-fox boss (Tim Robbins). He soon makes enemies of his former friends, who attend social events with white ties and black servants. And it takes a crash course in chemistry to unearth exactly what unbreakable string of carbon molecules DuPont came up with, with its human costs now literally buried in the ground and (gulp) in our bodies. Attacks roll off the Tefloncoated behemoth, and most of the film’s two hours plus is devoted to lawyerly strategies to at least chink that armour.
Especially now that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a front for the worst polluters, this material—taken from the New York Times Magazine and other reportage—is inherently compelling. It’s not automatically cinematic, however, and that makes the director’s anti-aesthetic particularly frustrating. The grungy ’70s look of his own Safe tackled enviro-paranoia at just the right distance. But Haynes is a hired gun here, working from a connect-the-dots script that dutifully keeps tacking back to Bilott’s dull suburban home life, primarily to give some busywork to a wasted Anne Hathaway, sporting a wig that’s halfway between sassy and Stepford.
In the end, the movie’s grim look, with its parade of grey silhouettes and murky shadows, feels more like a cop-out than a choice. When Bilott decides to go through boxes of DuPont evidence in a windowless storage room, he moves a desk lamp to the floor to sort papers, without flipping on an overhead light. That seems silly. But maybe he’s just being green.
STAND!
Starring Laura Slade Wiggins. Rated PG
➧ CANADA IS USUALLY seen as the Good Guy (pronoun optional) on the world stage. But you don’t have to go back very far at all to find bad behaviour regarding its treatment of minorities, Indigenous people, refugees, and even naturalized citizens. The turning away of Jews fleeing Hitler’s Europe and the maltreatment of Japanese Canadians during, and after, World War II are familiar black eyes. The 1919 General Strike in Winnipeg is a little more mysterious, though, and this ambitious musical attempts to redress that with a few songs and some period dress and choreography.
Written by Rick Chafe and Danny Schur, and based on the latter’s musical-theatre piece Strike!, the movie wears some West Side Story influences openly, centring its slice of social upheaval, labour unrest, and intra-ethnic tensions on the Romeo and Juliet–lite story of handsome Ukrainian steelworker Stefan Sokolowski (Glee’s Marshall Williams) and the Jewish suffragist Rebecca Almazoff (Laura Slade Wiggins), who lives next door.
If not quite Sharks-versus-Jets material, the immigrants don’t get along that well, but they have a common enemy in the form of Anglo soldiers, recently returned from the First World War and understandably disgruntled about the lack of work awaiting them. Industry captains, happy to have a huge pool of foreignborn workers willing to work for pennies, and genuinely freaked out by the Bolshevik upheaval in Russia, would rather fuel local resentment than accommodate anyone.
That’s when unions step in, intersecting with other social demands. Consequently, it’s not hard to get ex-soldiers—who here tend to call anyone from Eastern Europe a “bohunk”—to march with a banner reading “To Hell with the Alien Enemy”. They say history doesn’t really repeat, but it does rhyme.
Director Robert Adetuyi, a Canadian who works in Hollywood, makes a strong impression on a low budget, and marshals large groups of people in dynamic ways. The tale also offers a more widely representative view of who lived on the Prairies back then. But he’s less secure with smaller groups, especially with uneven acting talent; most players are speaking English with fake accents, and there’s a lot of stunted dialogue, along the lines of “Father, can’t you see that we’re all the same?”
The songs are pleasant, if sparse and not that memorable, and Stand! seems more likely to end up with viewers sitting in classrooms, not movie theatres—which, by the way, are rarely unionized.