Marriage Story

MARRIAGE STORY   ***1/2

Noah Baumbach

2019

IDEA:  A New York-based theater director and his L.A.-bred actress wife negotiate a turbulent divorce process between the two cities, with their young son caught in the middle.

BLURB:  Marriage Story is a story of disparities personal, vocational, and geographical, in which the systems of divorce – legal as well as social – turn a couple's relatively normal foibles into the shaky grounds for battle. New York or Los Angeles, Father or Mother, Broadway or Hollywood; the dichotomies set up by Baumbach compound the couple’s sense of being miles apart both physically and mentally, and coalesce into a conflict that outgrows, and then risks devouring, the humble, unquantifiable feelings on which their relationship is founded. The pain that emerges largely stems from the situation of two well-meaning people having to uncertainly depend on systems that can’t summarize, contain, or solve the complexities of their bond. Yet behind the hurt, underneath even its lacerating spats, Marriage Story is informed by an alleviating archness that indicates the narration of an artist using the medium as a performative form of self-exorcism. Humor pops from nearly every scene thanks to the director’s trademark badinage, pointing up the absurdity of legal processes here, wryly twisting the tenor of a conversation there. Comedy has rarely seemed so cathartic in a Baumbach film, to the point where it can, at times, undercut the interpersonal anguish. Viewed through the lens of auto-fiction, however, even the most comically heightened of characterizations come to read as reflections of someone creatively processing their experiences. This might suggest that Baumbach is smoothing over the past, or gesturing at self-exoneration, but that’s not the case. What is remarkable about this portrait is how mature and even-handed it is, how it finds in both partners qualities that invite vexation and understanding. It’s not called Divorce Story, after all; through the aching performances of Driver and Johansson, the film locates in discord an underlying intimacy that can’t be fully extinguished.

The Irishman

THE IRISHMAN   ***1/2

Martin Scorsese

2019

IDEA:  Former hit-man and Teamster Frank Sheeran recounts his time working for Jimmy Hoffa and the mob.

BLURB:  The Irishman runs over three hours and spans some fifty years, but you rarely feel the passage of either its narrative or onscreen time. Like a memory, duration empties out of it; days and years blur together through Thelma Schoonmaker’s typically propulsive edits, shuttling us between events whose temporal thickness gets flattened in the accumulation of experience. Faces, smoothed over and detached from both their actors’ appearances and our historical knowledge of them, exist outside of time altogether. This is an unusual effect for a long, reflective story about the tolls of history, but rather than hinder the film by robbing it of narrative sweep or physical heft, the approach allows Scorsese to do something he’s never done before in his prior gangster films: to show, with a grave, rueful moral lucidity, the permeating hollowness and existential futility of a life lived without ethics. Even during scenes most obviously designed for excitement, The Irishman is punctured by the melancholy of Frank Sheeran’s present-day testimony, coloring all the violence and corruption with a sobering hindsight. We know what it all leads to; Scorsese even compounds the sense of inevitability through chyrons revealing the characters’ mostly ignominious deaths. The film, although one of the director’s least visually remarkable works, is always reliably absorbing, invigorated by a host of strong performances and a snappy script from Zaillian. And then, of course, there’s the ballast around which it all must return: the image of De Niro’s superannuated Sheeran sitting in a nursing home, frail and alone. Now mere fragments of the past, what have all the hits, rackets, car bombs, retaliations, and ruthless political maneuvers amounted to? Stories, Scorsese says, that become movies about men who, if they’re lucky, will grow into old age accompanied only by memories.