Marriage Story Review: An Intense Emotional Rollercoaster

One of the most critically acclaimed movies this year is Marriage Story, a movie directed by Noah Baumbach and starred by Scarlett Johansson & Adam Driver, both established Hollywood stars that have been rising attention for how incredibly they are improving their acting skills, with better and better performances in the past years, where their credibility as serious dramatic actors has been noted fully by the Award giving community for their most recent projects.

As a quick synopsis, Marriage Story tells the story of Nicole & Charlie, and the negative & stressful impact that their spiraling down marriage & divorce process can strike to a family going through it.

For a deep down analysis of the theme click here!

The Emotional Rollercoaster

Baumbach achieves to make you feel empathy for either Charlie or Nicole every time a piece of the puzzle to their broken marriage is laid out. The movie can easily make you change sides during the first two acts of the movie for how great the movie manages to make you feel pity for each character during different situations. It’s incredible how this unbalance of affections can tilt, from holding a little grudge for Charlie and feeling sorry for Nicole, and then change each time the point of view of the story shifts.

Aside from the spectacular performances, that will be addressed in short, Marriage Story’s best achievement is to make this story feel real. This is a story that many couples around the world may identify with, and not necessarily for the fact that they also experienced a rough divorce and that theirs concluded in the same way as Nicole’s and Charlie’s story, but because relationships are hard; the fights, discussions, and the emptiness feeling some situations generate may surge even in the most stable relationship.

The movie needed just 15 minutes to layout to the audience the emotional burden of their divorce process as it provides an emotionally heavy and truthful description of the things each other loves about the other. This scene lifts you up to a positive stance until you realize this is just a failed therapy exercise aimed to help them both reconcile. From here on, it’s an all downhill road.

To understand their marital struggles, we need to first lookout at each other’s point of view as to why they think they need to separate, and Marriage Story makes a superb job in establishing both, Nicole’s & Charlie’s points of view in a slow and steady manner.

The fact that the spiraling down separation process evolves from a division agreed upon by the word of each other and without the use of lawyers, to a one-sided juridical process and then to a street fight manufactured by both lawyers just to win by any means necessary is just sad. The court hearing is the deciding point where the unbalance of emotions between supporting Charlie or Nicole hits dead in the middle. Side note: Kudos to Laura Dern in her supporting role as Nicole’s Lawyer. She had an extraordinary performance and she owned the screen every time she was in it.

The process consumed both so heavily that their lawyers started hyperbolizing the actions of the other just to win the case with a manipulated and false reality of what actually happened, that just makes you wonder how and why they got there and why they were separating in the first place. Watching both great lawyers’ debate in this scene is fascinating and emotionally hard to watch as both Charlie and Nicole show the burden of it accumulating in their expressions.

This precedes the ultimate climax of the story: the utterly heartbreaking and devastating discussion between Nicole and Charlie. This is a scene with a fantastic script that was followed & executed to perfection by Scarlett and Driver. This shows how mature as actors both have become and the lengths to which they can stretch their emotional range. Both actors have easily secured many nominations for their performances with this movie. They sell completely each emotion their character is feeling and succeed in making the audience feel them two; this is something not very easily achievable in film.

Taking Notes From Pixar’s Use Of Music

Marriage Story excels in its ability to transmit emotion to the viewer not only with its realistically cohesive story and the spectacular performances from its leads, but from the use and flexibility of its score.

Marriage story took note of Pixar’s style and applied it to its film. This style is sometimes known as the Pixar moment; the moment were the tears fall because of a greatly happy or melancholic moment. This is achieved with the help of one specific trick: reproducing the same theme song for its happy and sad moments, but in a different tempo and with different instruments.

The first time you hear the main theme song is in the opening scene with the loving, positive description each one was reading about the other. The song is heard for so long with a positive upside, that the audience starts associating this song with happiness. Nevertheless, beneath this point, the theme is only heard in the sad lows of each other during their tough divorce process, as in Charlie’s read-through of Nicole’s letter.

This makes the audience receive a conflicting message of emotions between what they see and what they hear, which only makes them remember subconsciously the previous happy moments with nostalgia and help them burst into emotion. This effect is also present when once again the song is used for one final, sweet (or bittersweet), moment. Marriage Story applies this very subtle and with much-added effect. For instance, the song is heard one last time in the final scene during a final happy hug between the ex-couple with their son after all is settled and both are actively trying to be better for the sake of Henry, their eight-year-old boy.

The Rundown:

Charlie best describes this story with one of the things he said during the opening images “I also cried four times… I wonder if it was the same four”.

Upon watching this movie, you should really bring a box of tissues, since you will also carry out the emotional burden from Charlie and Nicole, and will feel very real each and every one of the struggling moments of their Marriage Story. It conveys a very real and mature story that successfully manages to generate empathy to the viewer through each of its elements, with perhaps the best performance of Scarlett’s and Adam’s career.

This is a movie that very well will be in the center of attention of this next award season, and will further establish Noah Baumbach as one of Hollywood future Filmmaking stars.

Score: 9.5/10