Noah Baumbach, 2019 #4, 2019 Skandies
Once Marriage Story was well underway, I thought I had a pretty good sense of what kind of movie it was: an observational slice of life in which a couple’s amicable divorce grows, degree by subtle degree, less amicable. And it is that. But by the end, the degrees have accumulated to the point that the leads are letting loose like they’ve each gulped down a gallon of acting juice. And while that kind of makes the story less interesting, it is the logical endpoint of the narrative trajectory: we see the beginning (“I don’t want to be too aggressive. I want to stay friends.”) and follow the slow deterioration of the relationship to its ultimate end (“Every day I wake up and I hope you’re dead!”). Except that’s actually not the end. The movie keeps shambling onward, continuing into a farcical set piece that’s a mix of cringe comedy and gross-out humor. Then we get a new set of scenes in which the characters belt out showtunes. My objection here is not on the grounds of mimesis—real life encompasses many genres, and which one you’re in at any given moment can change at whiplash-inducing speeds—but rather that each change makes for a worse movie than the one before.
Back in the ’00s I put up a list of evaluative patterns that had made themselves evident in my Calendar articles up to that point. For instance, one that applies here to a certain extent is Pattern 43, which grumbles that “write what you know” often means we get books about writers, songs about musicians, and so forth. This is not a movie about filmmakers, but the lead characters are show folk (an actress and a stage director). And there’s a whole industry devoted to gossip about the relationships of show folk. A lot of those show folk seem like they’re splitting up with someone every second Tuesday, so how big a deal could it really be? Divorces and breakups seem so bland in the context of a capsule biography (“first marriage 1945–1947, second marriage 1955–1967, domestic partnership 1972–1973”), and in the case of creators, like something happening in the distant background while, surely, at the forefront of their attention was writing that novel or recording that album. But if Marriage Story has a takeaway (other than “avoid parties where the hosts make you watch them sing showtunes”), it’s that, no, each end date within those sets of parentheses means that multiple people’s lives fell into a crater. But that’s my takeaway from pretty much any story about a breakup or divorce. So I’m starting to feel like I need not only a list of evaluative patterns but also one of standard observations.
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