Microaggressions and misery: why Marriage Story is a rare example of a Hollywood divorce film
It is amazing how much great pop music has been inspired by break-ups – and how little great cinema. Perhaps we are happier dealing with heartbreak via three minutes of Adele or Fleetwood Mac than we are poring over it in liveaction detail for two hours. Give us a romcom any day. This is what makes Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, if not exactly refreshing, at least very honest.
Marriage Story is one of the rare movies to stare divorce in the face. Or faces. Intensely focused on its unhappy couple (Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson), it tracks the mechanics of the modern break-up with compassion and wit but also unsentimental precision: the micro-aggressions, the macro-aggressions, the custody tug of war, the bittersweet vestiges of love, and the way the lawyers can make a bad thing much worse.
The film pays homage to the Citizen Kane of divorce movies: Kramer vs Kramer, which won Oscars for Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep in 1980. But also Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon, Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage,
Starting Over, and several Woody Allens. You would hesitate to call it a golden age, but divorce rates were at a high in the 1970s and early 80s – as were appetites for movies on the subject, perhaps. Baumbach’s own parents were divorcing around the same time, an experience he processed in his excellent debut The Squid and the Whale. It would be tempting to read Marriage Story as a veiled account of Baumbach’s own separation from his wife Jennifer Jason Leigh, but despite admitting “a real connection to the material”, he insists the film is not purely autobiographical, although the husband character is treated noticeably more sympathetically.
It is not as though first-hand experience of divorce is in short supply in the film-making community. Baumbach has some way to go to catch up with the likes of Lana Turner (divorced eight times), Billy Bob Thornton (five) or Martin Scorsese (four). Despite, or perhaps because of, this, divorce is more often material for comedy, whether that is perky twins reuniting Mom and Pop (The Parent Trap), husbands cross-dressing to see their kids (Mrs Doubtfire), or exes taking revenge on their wealthy husbands (The First Wives Club). Whether it is a comedy or a drama, the feuding couple usually end up getting back together. In theory at least, Hollywood is firmly committed to the institution of marriage.
Intriguingly, a recent US academic study found that making couples watch, and then discuss, movies about relationships halved divorce rates – a more effective treatment than counselling. So maybe the romcoms are a better way to go after all. But if ever there was a movie that showed just how ugly it can all get, it’s Marriage Story. It doesn’t just put you off divorce; it puts you off getting married in the first place.