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Adam Driver: "Marriage Story"

Noah Baumbach, my hero, made several movies I love. "The Squid and the Whale," "Frances Ha," "The Meyerowitz Stories": all delightful.

Among Baumbach's many gifts: finding small absurd moments and catching them on camera. He and his partner Greta Gerwig have a thing called a brain dump, where they list their minor sociological observations, then decide how these gems can fit into a narrative.

For example, in "Meyerowitz": A slightly unhinged middle-aged man searches for a parking spot in Manhattan. Unforgettable. "Frances Ha": Our protagonist can't fit her full name into the tiny slot a New York City mailbox allows, so the name becomes (memorably) shortened. Charming. "The Squid and the Whale": A pretentious young man begins spewing forth his father's (pretentious) thoughts on Kafka, and of course it's revealed the emperor has no clothes. The critic has never read the book.

"Marriage Story"--once again--has these tiny moments. By far the highlight of the film is the scene in which Merritt Wever tries to hand Adam Driver a set of divorce papers. Everything that is ludicrous and unmanageable about human communication is packed into this scene. Driver knows something is off, but can't label the problem: He fixates on a pie Wever has baked. What is with that sinister pie?

A young son's pooping issues interrupt the dramatic scene. (Is ScarJo handing out too many presents? Is she now handing out a present for a poop?) A clear, compassionate speech was meant to precede the delivery of the papers: This doesn't happen. The papers were meant to pass from Wever to Driver: This doesn't happen. You actually feel the tension as things escalate. The vibe is funny and painful--just as life itself is (often) both funny and painful.


"Marriage Story" doesn't sustain this energy, and I wonder if it's because Baumbach is trying too hard *not* to be autobiographical. Everyone knows he recently went through a divorce, and everyone knows that superficial details are similar to the details of the script. But--unlike "The Squid and the Whale"--"Marriage Story" actually doesn't consistently feel uncomfortably close to life. The main characters feel fuzzy sometimes; I'm not always sure that the writer loves the people he is writing about. (By contrast, the source of fascination in "Squid and the Whale" was often Baumbach's painful, riveting, ambivalent love for his own parents.)

I'm not sure why certain movies get the Oscar traction they get. I suppose that "Marriage Story" is such a force this year in part because of Driver's rage at the climax (exciting), and because Baumbach has a really smart observation (i.e. the law requires us to take a delicate human moment and turn it into something hideous from Kafka. There we go again! Kafka!)

Anyway, I'm glad I watched, and I recommend the movie, but I'll warn you, it's not Baumbach's best. This will become clearer as time marches on.
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