A Review of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story
Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, which is nominated for six Oscars this weekend, including Best Picture, opens with a woman called Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) walking up the stairs of a New York subway station. A man, in a voiceover, is listing the qualities he loves about this woman. “She makes people feel comfortable,” he says, “about even embarrassing things.” A moment later, Nicole is stopped by an animal-rights activist holding a clipboard. She beams and takes the clipboard, signing her name. Being from New York, I have often been approached in this way. Usually, I beg off with a lame excuse. But until I watched Marriage Story, it had never occurred to me that anything embarrassing had taken place. Is it embarrassing to care about something most people ignore, even if that thing is important?
This voiceover is soon revealed to belong to Nicole’s husband, Charlie (Adam Driver), and a little later, in a skillful twist, to be qualities he intends to list in a mediation session; the two are divorcing. Charlie, we’ll learn, is a self-made theater director who escaped a damaged childhood in Indiana to become a big deal in the city’s theater scene and, we are told, “more New Yorker than any New Yorker.” As the movie goes on, viewers might speculate as to why a self-absorbed workaholic from a background like Charlie’s would see an animal-rights activist as embarrassed. But at the very least, that opening detail is an early indication that Marriage Story is not really about marriage, as it purports to be, or even divorce, but about the existential confusion that results from needing to succeed by bourgeois standards.
Charlie and Nicole are working artists (she is an actor). But, as in many of Baumbach’s films, neither professional seems to take much pleasure in art itself. The precipitating incident that has caused their marriage to end is Nicole’s moving to LA to shoot a TV pilot. She is honest about the fact that she doesn’t know whether the pilot is any good. On the flight over to LA, she reads the show’s script through Charlie’s eyes and thinks it’s cheesy. The brief glimpses we get of the show itself seem to confirm that it is at least carelessly made and possibly dreck, a sub–Deep Space Nine fantasia treated with an air of gentle satire.
Meanwhile, Charlie, the picture of aesthetic assurance, seems equally unfamiliar with aesthetic pleasure. When he gives notes to Nicole on a recent performance, he does so, as Nicole says, just so he can sleep at night. Romantic mind-states affiliated at least in popular imagination with the figure of the artist — ones colored by inspiration, doubt, Eros, surprise, or passion — don’t much slow him down. The pleasures he takes in his theater company are largely operational and reputational, akin to a CEO’s. Charlie is efficient and ambitious and repeats to anyone who will listen that he is about to make his Broadway debut.
Many of the working artists in Baumbach’s films are so driven. In fact, watching his movies, one might be left with the impression that the sole pleasure art can afford its maker is as a forum through which to earn praise, so wholly are a professional artist’s happiness and level of acclaim equated. In The Squid and the Whale, the miserable novelist Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) can’t score an agent while his soon-to-be ex-wife, Joan (Laura Linney), the one who ended things and is dating a hot young tennis instructor, has recently published a short story in The New Yorker. The sour father (Dustin Hoffman) in The Meyerowitz Stories struggles to secure a spot in a group show at Bard, but his genial foil, LJ Shapiro (Judd Hirsch), enjoys a huge retrospective at MoMA. In fact, I can’t think of a single professional artist in all of Baumbach’s films whose work is good but underappreciated, or one who is content to make art that is not widely praised by established arbiters of taste. (The closest might be John Tuturro’s writer in Margot at the Wedding, though he is judged to be a doormat, ultimately persuasively, by the successful novelist who has made him a cuckold; similarly, the documentarian Ben Stiller plays in While We’re Young, who claims to love the process, is revealed through the course of the film to be a procrastinator.) Candid aesthetic pleasure, when it does appear, is usually the preserve of struggling dreamers (Frances in Frances Ha), grinding has-beens (Greenberg in 2010’s Greenberg), hobbled mensches (Adam Sandler), or amateurs, more generally.
You might well say this is all realistic, and it’s true, you don’t have to spend much time at ambiently nasty parties in Brooklyn or Silver Lake to know that literary and art circles in New York and Los Angeles are often defined as much by pettiness and envy as they are by any aesthetic conviction. It’s like that Oscar Wilde zinger: “When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money.” But while the parties may be nasty, there’s also the rest of these artists’ lives, and in some of these scenes, aesthetic merit does actually matter — matters enough for people to have devoted themselves to a line of work all but invariably deformed by precarity and rejection. In fact, this obnoxious air of artistic judgment, when driven by aesthetic acumen, can also perform a noble function: to protect from the assaults of bad faith and taste vital pursuits that have few worldly defenses, like those of truth and beauty.
Such lofty abstractions, needless to say, aren’t words one can easily imagine either Nicole or Charlie saying with any sincerity. What do they care about? In what feels like an honest moment, Nicole confesses to her divorce attorney, Nora (Laura Dern), that she took the gig in Los Angeles as a way to “claim a bit of Earth” for herself. By these terms at least, Nicole’s succeeded by the end of the movie. We still don’t know if her TV show is any good, or if, outside of a throwaway line at the very end of the film, she actually enjoys working on it, but at least she is directing episodes and has nabbed an Emmy nomination. She also wins a golden retriever of a partner, bounding around her LA bungalow and wielding a Super Soaker. Like the television show, he seems to be without content, but he is devoted to her.
And Charlie? Ostensibly, he is defined by his taste. He’s the kind of director who can coolly point out which stool he prefers for an upcoming set while an elite divorce lawyer taunts him over the phone. But to what end? In dramatic terms, he wants to keep the family in New York. In fact, outside of talking about his Broadway debut, Charlie can most often be heard repeating, “We are a New York family,” mostly to lawyers while his family, or what’s left of it, has already decamped to Los Angeles.
Many of Baumbach’s male characters are armed with self-deceiving slogans like this one. In The Squid and the Whale, the failed Bernie Beckman semi-ironically assigns to various works of art the label “filet.” Dustin Hoffman’s almost forgotten Meyerowitz is maniacally focused on the reputational success of his sculptural “work,” and the failed musician-turned-carpenter Greenberg is “deliberately doing nothing.” These men share with Pez dispensers stupefied, defensive eyes, a frozen affect, and a generally disembodied quality, uttering these tangy poisons in rapid fire from the back of the throat in place of anything actually sustaining to themselves, or those around them. And a hallmark of Baumbach’s films is the way in which his movies handle these men like the Pez dispensers they are: With a compulsive glee, the films push on the bubblehead of the liar until his inner emptiness is revealed. Beckman will never be the “filet.” Meyerowitz is more or less out of “work.” And Greenberg’s “doing nothing,” his total paralysis, is hardly a choice.
Something similar begins to happen with Charlie. After all, while one can appreciate the grievous upheaval the moving of a theater company to Los Angeles might represent for him, or the shittiness of spending a lot of time in a city he detests, or the dreadful schlep and expense of living bi-coastally, none of these reasons seem to account for the particular vicious tenacity with which Charlie clings to the “New York” part of his “New York family.” Rather, as the movie encourages us to do, we begin to see the truth in Nicole’s accusations of egotism: Charlie feels like a “filet” in New York, and experiences a potential move to Los Angeles as an interruption of control, and a social demotion. Indeed, as Charlie’s plans fall apart, as I watched Adam Driver dash capably through scenes, I was put in mind of that old game show Supermarket Sweep. Contestants had a few minutes to sprint through the aisles of an empty supermarket, collecting as many goods as they could, with the goal of reaching the highest market total. Maybe some of these people enjoyed as an end onto itself violently hurling cans of tuna into a shopping cart, but they did it mostly, I think, because they were playing a game, and because if they did a good enough job, they would win a check. In much this way, Charlie seems happy to play at the contest of art — and plays it very well — until his wife’s moving to LA begins to mess with the reward of his lifestyle (his “New York family”) and his suave efficiency is revealed to have under it a rudderless panic.
Charlie comes close to saying as much during a climactic fight with Nicole. He is justifying an extramarital affair by highlighting the fidelity he previously kept, during their early partnership: “There’s so much I could’ve done,” he says. “I was a director in my twenties who came from nothing and was suddenly on the cover of fucking Time Out New York. I was hot shit and I wanted to fuck everybody, and I didn’t.” Perhaps this is meant to be an arbitrary jab, but it felt like an honest moment to me, one of the few in the movie. In fact, it’s a line that appears three other times in Baumbach’s work: Jeff Daniels says all but the same thing twice to his oldest son, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), in The Squid and the Whale, and Ben Stiller’s Greenberg delivers an almost identical line to his ex-girlfriend Beth (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh). The detail is recurrent, I think, because while each character is ostensibly talking about a relationship to a person, they are also talking about their relationship to art: the material and social rewards are what these characters are in it for, more than any sustaining satisfaction found in the practice itself.
This is why, I suspect, artistic praise and personal contentment are more or less synonymous in Baumbach’s work. The purpose of art in his films is rather simple: It’s to indicate who is winning and who is losing, and the great terror most of his films conjure is that of being a social loser. By such a metaphysics, it makes sense that the purpose of making art, or of doing anything for that matter, is to ensure that one will win — in the case of art, this usually means winning social or cultural capital. In fact, when put in the simple terms of winning and losing, the plot of Marriage Story, while not deep, makes perfect sense: When they first met, Nicole, a hot movie actor, was winning; at the start of the movie, Charlie, now a celebrated theater guy, is winning; the movie ends with Charlie having taken a hit, which is to say, a residency at UCLA. Nicole is slightly elevated, Charlie humbled. By the scorecard of cultural capital, a certain reckoning has occurred.
But has either learned anything? Have Charlie and Nicole had an experience, or just an ordeal? Living to accrue social status, after all, means caring a great deal about received standards. In other words, whether one succeeds or fails by the measure of conventional values is incidental to a deeper form of suffering shared by dogged winners and losers alike: that of being alive without having found — or had the courage to pursue — what one authentically wants. In this context, it makes sense that the very successful theater director Charlie seems, on the inside, to feel very much the same as Greenberg and Bernie Beckman, the two previous deliverers of the line about sexual regret, and huge losers, both. In Charlie’s silly admission about Time Out New York, there is a kernel of real loss: He’s saying, “I was so busy throwing detergent into a shopping cart I never tasted food.”
As we are all to some degree or another hectored into pursuing socially rewarded bullshit that often fails to make us happy, I think this confusion is an important theme and a likely universal experience, and some of my favorite moments in Baumbach’s movies conjure the visceral force of this feeling. I’m thinking of the penultimate scene in Greenberg when the agoraphobe Greenberg (Ben Stiller), on a hungover whim, decides to go to Australia with his young niece and her friend, but is gripped by a panic attack on the way to the airport. Of Frances’s flubbed trip to Paris in Frances Ha. Or of the final and very moving scene in The Squid and the Whale when Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) escapes his father’s hospital bedside and runs to the Museum of Natural History to take in the sublime diorama he could, as a child, only peek at through his fingers.
But this doesn’t happen in Marriage Story: The film keeps protecting Charlie from a more honest confrontation with his own confusion. Take the moment when Charlie has been bested by the brilliant defense attorney Nora: The couple is in mediation and Charlie, for the first time, realizes he’s not going to win — his wife and his son, Henry, are going to stay in Los Angeles. The group breaks for lunch, but Charlie doesn’t know what to order. Nicole, seeing his distress, jumps in and orders her husband the chicken Caesar. Moments later, Charlie heads to a dismal conference room with his gentle schlub of a lawyer (Alan Alda). A headache has descended, and Charlie squeezes his temples, staring at the clock.
At that point in the film, it seems that Charlie might begin to realize something. What might that be? Perhaps that the sources of his unhappiness run much deeper than the failure of his marriage or the disintegration of his Brooklyn lifestyle? That he has lost any connection to vitality? That outside of proving he is not a very scared kid from Indiana he might not know why he gets up in the morning?
In such a version of this movie, what would happen next? Maybe, as Laura Linney in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me finds herself doing in the face of an annoying new boss, Charlie would set a meeting with Nora, and then ask her out, and later make a pass at her? Or like Matthew Broderick’s teacher in Alexander Payne’s Election, Charlie would experience a slew of intrusive fantasies that star his antagonist? Or like Baumbach’s own Greenberg, Charlie would be led down an increasingly hurtful road of an embarrassment, watching as an evil-looking black sock puppet of an animal is fished out of a private pool, later quoting the part in Wall Street when Charlie Sheen says, “Who am I?”
What happens instead? Charlie says to his lawyer, “I need him to know I fought for him.” Charlie is talking about his son, Henry. The conviction is delivered, like many of Charlie’s, as if through a pleasant fog of self-deception. Fought for him how? The question, practically speaking, is whether Charlie can live bi-coastally, or even, as seems to be well within his resources, relocate to Los Angeles. (In fact, by the end of the movie, he has, without much evident trouble, taken a residency in LA.) In what way is his insistence on keeping the family in New York fighting for his son? The father is fighting for his own lifestyle.
In the latter half of the movie, these emotional beats feel equally off because while they seem intended to move toward a catharsis around familial loss, they actually trace a man’s lament for his loss of control, and his confusion around his diminished status. And because of the fogginess around the content of the story being told, these turns skew, with variable awareness, toward self-pity. As when Charlie (dressed passive-aggressively as the Invisible Man) insists on dragging his kid trick-or-treating even though Henry is dead-tired, or when Charlie cries when seeing his son reading the list of traits Nicole once loved about Charlie, a moment in which Charlie is so drawn into his own teary response, he all but ignores that his son, a late reader, has had a breakthrough. (I did like the scene when Charlie is watched by a court-sent observer in part because the sequence is about his being lost, and has little to do with unearned claims of familial love.) Just before this, we have Charlie singing Sondheim’s “Being Alive” to his troupe. But because Charlie has been defined almost entirely by his bloodlessness, by his turning away from life and into himself, I’m not sure what the song is meant to show. His inner trance, one assumes, can continue unabated on either coast.
I couldn’t help but contrast this singing scene with a moment in Greenberg when Greenberg goes to see his brother’s personal assistant, Florence (Greta Gerwig), perform at an open mic in Los Angeles. Greenberg is a miserable solipsist who has been all but permanently spiritually deformed from having fucked up a record deal decades before. When he sees Florence singing, the look that comes into Ben Stiller’s face, the face of a wary lemur, is one of severe terror and longing. His eyes deepen with a look of insoluble concern. He’s falling in love. Like anyone in this position, Greenberg has no control over what is happening, only over whether he has the courage to obey his desire.
Rare for Baumbach’s protagonists, Greenberg wants something — in this case, someone — that has little to do with clinching status. That is to say, he begins to enter the spooky and deranging bazaar of authentic desire. This is a shadowy and treacherous place and a territory far from the blithe transparency of the market, where consensus determines value. Toothpaste is $5 because that’s how much most people will pay. In the bazaar, no market can be possible because there can be no set prices when each person wants very few things, and wants those unbearably.
Given the chattering of Pez dispensers all around us yammering ceaselessly, filling our heads with the promise of a poison, it would be easy to doubt that this bazaar exists at all, that there are any desires outside those already cut to size by the market. Everywhere miserable voices claim that everyone wants the same trophy, and that winning the trophy is the same as deeply living, or that only those who deeply live end up winning it. But the bazaar is real: We know it is because we visit this place in our dreams, in states of play and fantasy, and because our deepest selves live there. And good art takes us to this deeper place — in narrative art, because its characters go there, and in so doing show us what’s of value. It is not an accident that of the many sophisticates in Baumbach’s films, Greenberg is one of the few who cares seriously about art outside of consensus opinion.
I should say, there is one character in Marriage Story who knows what she likes: the divorce attorney Nora. Her senses are alive: She serves great tea, knows where to order lunch. With expressive wrists and a high, appraising strut, Nora is the film’s most sensual and vital figure, and she actually likes art: “There was that one moment where you smell the toast — smell,” she tells Charlie of his recent play, just after dismembering him legally. In fact, Laura Dern so dominates the film that a person floating through a room where Marriage Story is playing would be forgiven for thinking it is the divorce attorney, with her capacities for sincere warmth and vital aggression, and not either of the gray couple, who is the creative type. Why can’t art, and the people devoted to it, be allowed such life?
