Bittersweet melody
Kylie Klein-Nixon recalls her divorce had a theme song.
My divorce had a theme tune. I haven’t thought about that in years – at least I hadn’t until I watched Noah Baumbach’s divorce drama Marriage Story, a film I’d been avoiding for fear of dredging up some feelings I don’t really want to deal with.
I needn’t have worried. For all it’s a film about divorce, Marriage Story is an absolute delight, such a delight that it made remembering my divorce theme song – the Mountain Goats’ No Children – delightful, too.
All the best things about my marriage were set to music. Lying on our bellies in front of the turntable in our first flat, our feet kicked up and knocking together as we sing along to Belle and Sebastian; brushing shoulders as we pore through the bins in some dingy second-hand record shop, Nina Simone crooning from shop speakers; beautifully compiled mix tapes with tender dedications; halting, slightly off-key renditions of cheesy love songs.
So it’s not surprising that, like our marriage, our breakup should have a soundtrack, too.
Like a scene from . . . well, a Noah Baumbach movie, No Children plays over a somewhat hazy memory I have of my ex-husband staggering up the stairs of a double-decker bus one drizzly London night with a suitcase in his hand. I think it’s the last time we were ever together.
It was 20 years ago and I was a bit of an emotional wreck at the time, so I’m sure I’m muddled up about it, but there it is. My divorce theme tune.
The divorce in Marriage Story has a theme song, too. At least husband Charlie Barber (Adam Driver, who’d better get an Oscar nomination for that performance or so help me God) discovers he has one towards the end of the film, when he leaps up to sing a jaunty rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s Being Alive to a group of his friends and colleagues, only to realise halfway through that he’s actually singing those raw, vulnerable lyrics – ‘‘make me alive, make me alive’’, ‘‘somebody make me care’’ – about himself. Driver nails that moment. With his tremulous, surprisingly decent voice, what starts out as a bit of a laugh, turns bleak and desperate as he staggers to the final refrain. It’s devastating, and I felt every word of it like a jab in the kidneys. It was kind of that way for me the first time I heard No Children, a sharp, pointed finger in the soft bits – not the least because the one saving grace of my divorce was that, like the song, we didn’t have any kids to destroy in our bitterness Olympics. It wasn’t until later that I realised the song perfectly captures this weird camaraderie that exists in a divorce. Sure, it’s a camaraderie based on despair but, you know, it’s a despair you’re in together. It might even be the last good thing you accomplish as a unit.
Unlike me and No Children’s imaginary narrator, Charlie and his ex Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) do have a child to protect, so the stakes are higher.
They have to call it quits in a way that keeps the family together, even though they are not. That they do – and how they do – is what elevates Marriage Story above mere melodrama. It’s no coincidence that as a walking, talking symbol of their relationship, son Henry Barber (Azhy Robertson), gets less obnoxious as the film goes on.
It’s not a painless job, fixing themselves. Is it ever?
In one harrowing scene the pair meet to ‘‘talk’’ it out, away from the lawyers, her family and more importantly, Henry.
It’s only in this empty, impersonal room, like a cut-price doctor’s office, that they can finally lance the relationship boil that’s been growing over the course of the film.
When Nicole pushes the otherwise calm and self-possessed Charlie to finally come to terms with his shortcomings as a husband, he totally breaks down.
‘‘If it wouldn’t hurt [our son], I wish you would die,’’ he snaps before collapsing, clutching Nicole’s legs, and sobbing like a child himself.
That’s what’s got me muddling up No Children and its ‘‘I hope you die, I hope we both die’’ ending with Noah Baumbach’s film. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I know what that brutal sentiment feels like.
Nicole knows that Charlie doesn’t mean it. Of course he doesn’t.
What Charlie wants, what No Children’s far too honest narrator wants, what I wanted, desperately, was for the connection, that screaming, halfsevered nerve that feels like it’s never going to stop hurting, to die. Because that’s the only way you’re ever getting over this thing.
There are lots of ways you can read Nicole comforting Charlie after he unloads on her – some of them not so generous to either of them. But to me that scene is what I mean when I say there’s a weird camaraderie in divorce.
Until I saw Marriage Story, I didn’t think anyone except me and the Mountain Goats had got that.
But as Baumbach seems to say that leaning into the worst of our awkward, vulnerable feelings is how we get through them best, it feels like he gets it, too.