Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is actually about the opposite of marriage – husband and wife Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) know their partnership is over, but they’re trying to do their best for each other and their young son. What begins as a compassionate and humane separation devolves into a raw tragicomic saga when the machinations of two shark family lawyers (Laura Dern and Ray Liotta) inflame the couple’s old wounds and resentments. Full of Baumbach’s signature intellectual bickering, this therapeutic, brutal, and hilarious drama is based off the writer-director’s real life divorce. Find out what can truly be forgiven when two hardheaded artists split ways after so much history together and what love has to do with Los Angeles.
“Marriage Story manages to be one of this year’s best thrillers, comedies and romcoms all at once. A tender, taut gem of a film that will make you reconsider love and loss.” – Terri White, Empire
“It’s funny and sad, sometimes within a single scene, and it weaves a plot out of the messy collapse of a shared reality, trying to make music out of disharmony. The melody is full of heartbreak, loss and regret, but the song is too beautiful to be entirely melancholy.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“Marriage Story is an emotionally lacerating experience, a nearly flawless elegy for a beautifully flawed couple, a broken-family classic to set beside Kramer vs. Kramer and Fanny and Alexander, to name two films that Baumbach references visually here.” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
