Marriage Story | ★★★★½ | Opening Friday, Nov. 29

The most useful thing to know in advance about Noah Baumbach’s latest, Marriage Story, is that it’s unlike any of his previous movies in style and tone. This should intrigue Baumbach fans, and if it brings in a few detractors, too, that’s good, because this is one of the best films of the year.

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson star as Charlie and Nicole, an artist couple in Brooklyn with an eight-year-old son. Charlie is a successful theater director, and Nicole is a former teen movie star turned struggling actor. Nicole wants to return to California to resume her movie career, which she abandoned to support her husband’s ambitions. Charlie doesn’t.

What follows is a relatively amicable split that suddenly goes supernova when lawyers get involved. Marriage Story is an elegant work of dramatic art, with performers working at peak levels, but it’s also a ferocious assault on what might be termed the divorce-industrial complex. The film’s blunt-force power as social critique comes from its artfulness. It never preaches, just presents a story: Here’s how this industry ruins people to make money.

Baumbach stitches in a dozen more story threads, too, and by the end, we’re fully involved with these two very specific people. The movie is often surprisingly funny. In one scene, Ray Liotta’s thuggish lawyer tries to dig up dirt on Nicole by asking Charlie about her recreational drug use. “Cocaine?” the lawyer asks. “Not in any real way,” Charlie says, thinking hard. “She was addicted to Tums for a while.” 

Those familiar with the director’s previous films will recognize the screwball comedy built into the architecture of the script, but his usual archness is absent. In fact, the style is essentially invisible. I just didn’t think about technique, or even Baumbach, while watching it. I was too engaged with the emotions and the characters.

Because Marriage Story is really a divorce story, it’s an uncomfortable experience to watch with your spouse. It’s scary; it just is. My wife and I were both so shook up that we essentially renewed our vows on the car ride home. But if you can brave it, you’ll see that the villain isn’t either half of the couple; it’s the divorce-law machine itself.

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