Review of Marriage Story (2019) by Jluis_001 — 06 Dec 2019

I will not be the person who says that this is a bad film because it's not but apparently many people forgot that Kramer vs. Kramer exists and it's actually better.

I mean it's funny because when I read about Marriage Story and watched the trailers, Kramer vs. Kramer was the first movie I thought of.

Does that mean Marriage Story lacks originality? No, but that's mainly due to the fact that the root of its story is centered on gender imbalance.

The recurring case in couples of: what I do became less important than what you do and it's quite evident that this is the main reason for the separation the film tolds. Maybe other things did their harm but that's the key point.

The thing is the film walks again and again on that line without achieving a more interesting balance and especially for the little that both characters grow during their hard journey. Especially Charlie, Adam Driver's character. Ironically, although it seems that Baumbach wanted to show more balance between both sides, he does not succeed, especially because even though he allows Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) to express her frustrations at the same time as her personal and professional ambitions beyond her family life, when the time comes for the court fights, Baumbach turns Nicole's voice in court into a kind of villain. Her lawyer, which is ironic because her lawyer is someone who is really understanding what Nicole is expressing.

I always felt the film was more inclined towards Charlie's side. For the rest, well I can say that I don't deny that both Driver and Johansson's performances are pretty good and I certainly believe that they will get into the Oscar nominations but their work is not really the reflection of the background of their characters or the story for that matter, because as I said, this film is not bad at all but its strengths lie in updating the subject in our times, nothing more, yet something like divorce we know that not only encompasses the issues we see here.

This was a really good film to close this year and another success for Netflix and its catalog but honestly I keep saying that Baumbach is credited with merits that I simply do not see in him.