new york times movie review marriage story

Film Review: ‘Marriage Story’

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are a couple who enter the divorce zone in a Noah Baumbach drama that's so accomplished it elevates the writer-director of 'The Squid and the Whale' to a whole new level.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ Marriage Story ” is the Noah Baumbach movie we’ve been waiting for. It’s better than good; it’s more than just accomplished. After 10 features, released over a quarter century of filmmaking (his debut, “Kicking and Screaming,” came out in 1995; his other films include “The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg,” and “Frances Ha”), this, at long last, is Baumbach’s breakthrough into the dramatic stratosphere. At once funny, scalding, and stirring, built around two bravura performances of incredible sharpness and humanity, it’s the work of a major film artist, one who shows that he can capture life in all its emotional detail and complexity — and, in the process, make a piercing statement about how our society now works.

The movie is a drama of divorce, and when it’s over you may feel like you know the lives it’s about as well as you know your own. Yet “Marriage Story” isn’t just the tale of a marital breakdown and its aftermath. It’s a film about divorce: how it operates, what it means, its larger consequences. Television periodically confronts this kind of thing (on “Big Little Lies,” say), but if you’re wondering when it was that a movie last dealt with the subject of separation on such a big-picture scale, you might have to go back 40 years — to the era of “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Scenes from a Marriage,” and “Shoot the Moon.” “Marriage Story” makes a worthy addition to that canon, though so much has changed. Divorce was commonplace back then, but this is the first film set inside what might be called the divorce-industrial complex. It’s about two people coming to terms with a process that, however necessary, is more wounding at times than their heartbreak.

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As the movie opens, we hear the voices of Charlie ( Adam Driver ) and Nicole ( Scarlett Johansson ), who’ve been married for 10 years and have an 8-year-old son, Henry (Azhy Robertson). As the two take turns describing what each one cherishes about the other, their lists are accompanied by a montage of moments from their domestic life, which are staged with such resonantly casual detail — the way Charlie brushes the hair off his nose as Nicole gives him a bathroom scissor cut; the way she leaves her Zabar’s and Pink Freud mugs standing around with teabags in them; his face-stuffing; her jar-opening; the family’s hyper-competitive Monopoly games — that though we don’t even know these characters yet, you grin with recognition. The montage tells us something vital (that Charlie and Nicole have never stopped loving each other), and it therefore raises a question: Why are they getting divorced? Couldn’t they work it out?

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It’s Nicole who has instigated the split. She’s an actress, raised in Los Angeles, who had an indie It Girl moment (she starred in a sexy hip romance called “All Over the Girl”), and then, after falling in love with Charlie, moved to New York to marry him and become the star of his downtown experimental theater company. They were in their twenties, gifted and successful, and once their son was born they created a nice life in Park Slope. As far as Charlie is concerned, he’s living the dream. But Nicole had periodic stirrings about relocating to L.A., which Charlie “discussed” but never took seriously. That’s because he’s a New York guy. Besides, his troupe is based in New York, and he directs the shows, including an “Electra” that’s headed to Broadway. How could they possibly move?

Nicole, however, now has the chance to star in a TV pilot that could lead to a series. And what she realizes is that though she loves her family, she has spent the marriage living Charlie’s dream, putting hers on perpetual hold. There are ways to solve this kind of conflict, of course; that’s what the growing pains of a good marriage are about. But Baumbach has captured how taste, personality, and ego can add up to one stubborn road block. There’s a telling moment when Charlie, the avant-garde dynamo, reminds Nicole that he doesn’t watch television, as the film flashes over to a glimpse of the “cool” horror movie he’s watching instead. This is the sort of male credibility distinction that means everything and nothing — but in this case, it means more than Charlie knows, since his dismissal of “television” includes a kneejerk diminishment of the centrality of Nicole’s career.

It’s the old New York-vs.-L.A. values debate, the one mythologized in “Annie Hall,” only the way this plays out in “Marriage Story” is far more lacerating. Nicole, convinced that Charlie loves everything about her except for the yearnings that challenge his, heads to L.A. to shoot her pilot. She takes Henry, crashing at the home of her mother, Sandra (Julie Hagerty), a former TV actress herself. There’s no debate about whether the divorce is happening; it’s on.

But here’s where the drama begins. Charlie still doesn’t get it. He accepts that his marriage is over, and he and Nicole, who are not wealthy (he funnels the money they make back into the theater company), agree not to get into a war over dividing the spoils. All well and good. But Charlie still thinks they’re “a New York family.” He’s not a bad guy, but he’s so innocently self-directed that even in divorce, he thinks he’s going to have a version of the life he had before. They’ll live a few blocks from each other and share custody of Henry!

But that, of course, isn’t the way it works. Divorces are infamous for monetary blood feuds, but what happens when you have a kid, and one parent wants to live across the country? How do you divide that ? Charlie trails Nicole out to L.A., and what he learns, as soon as she hires the celebrity divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), is that there’s the life he was living, and there’s divorce world, in which appearance becomes reality, the court system isn’t listening to the nuances of your desires, and the lawyers charge such bankrupting fees that as soon as you’ve entered the battle you’ve lost the war.

At least, that’s how Charlie sees it. All he’s trying to do is maintain his connection to his son, and he feels like a criminal. (The fact that Henry likes L.A., along with trendy L.A. things like sock pants, didn’t figure into Charlie’s plans.) There are two sides to every divorce, and in “Marriage Story” Baumbach divides our sympathies in a most ingenious way. More than half of the 2-hour-and-16-minute drama is told from Charlie’s point of view, so it seems as if the divorce is all happening to him. And since Adam Driver is an intensely sympathetic actor, we can feel, as Charlie gets buried under circumstances beyond his control, that we’re “on his side.”

But Baumbach peels back the truth of this marriage, layer by layer. And we start to see that Charlie, for all his affection and intelligence, doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. The scene in which Johansson’s Nicole relates the story of their marriage to her lawyer is a blistering tour de force. The action she has taken may be brutal, but it’s right for her. This is a movie about New York vs. L.A. that’s really about the battle between the 20th-century cult of the Creative Dude and the 21st-century reality that women have many more choices than they once did.

It’s also about how the system of divorce, as it now operates, can be one big messed-up s—t show. Charlie learns that he’s not allowed to hire a lawyer his wife has consulted with even once (and she went to a ton of them). He learns that the court will expect him to have a home in L.A. (lest he seem like a visiting derelict), but that once he rents an apartment there it just increases the case for saying that they’re an L.A.-based family. (Talk about damned if you do… ) He finds a schlubby family lawyer (Alan Alda), who basically tells him to cut his losses, then hires his own $950-an-hour attack-dog attorney (Ray Liotta). When Liotta’s raspy bulldog and Dern’s righteous legal Valkyrie face off in court, we hear the raw facts of the couple’s lives twisted into the most warped shapes.

Yet one of the powerful subtleties of “Marriage Story” is that the divorce process, flawed as it is, becomes the vehicle through which Charlie and Nicole confront the underlying reality of their marriage. They go to court, and tear up their lives, all to solve a problem that Charlie, if he was a different sort of man, could have solved in two minutes.

Baumbach’s brilliant screenplay never falters or hits a wrong note. He has come up with smart, witty, saddened, and searching characters whose ability to articulate their feelings is never less than lifelike, and he writes scenes that are like verbal arias. When Nicole shows up at the generic apartment Charlie has rented, the two try to “work things out,” but as they descend into a zone of raw accusation (You’re a slob! You’re a dictator! You used me to further your career! You slept with that stage manager!), the dialogue is like Bergman in media-age overdrive, and Johansson and Driver deliver it in such a fiercely connected fit of anger that the scene wounds, enthralls, and moves you to tears.

The supporting actors, in their way, are every as memorable, from Dern’s iron-clawed feminist crusader (her speech about why there will always be different expectations of mothers and fathers is a ripsnorting classic) to Liotta’s beady-eyed straight-shooter to Mary Hollis Inboden’s scene-stealing performance as a family-court evaluator who is such a disaffected space case that the moment she walks in the door to judge Charlie’s fitness as a father, she stands in for everything that’s inadequate about the divorce process. (She gets to top off the film’s most delicious running joke, which is that everyone — even an evaluator weighing in on a custody hearing about where Henry should live — reflexively recommends L.A. for “the space.”)

Late in the film, there are two scenes built around Stephen Sondheim songs from the great 1970 musical “Company.” “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” is performed by Nicole and her mother and sister at a party, while Charlie does a rendition of “Being Alive” in a piano bar after work. They add up to a haunting yin-and-yang of male and female perception. Driver’s wistful performance of “Being Alive” could almost stand in for anyone’s view of marriage. Yet marriage, though it can feel to those of us who cherish it like the difference between being alive and being nowhere, isn’t always enough. “Marriage Story” captures that truth with such an exquisite combination of love and heartbreak that it leaves you chastened and enraptured.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Competition), Aug. 29, 2019. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 136 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of a Heyday Films, Netflix production. Producers: Noah Baumbach, David Heyman. Executive producer: Craig Shilowich.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Noah Baumbach. Camera (color, widescreen): Robbie Ryan. Editor: Jennifer Lame. Music: Randy Newman.
• With: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Azhy Robertson, Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, Julie Hagerty, Alan Alda, Mary Hollis Inboden, Wallace Shawn, Merritt Wever.

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• Noah Baumbach’s <i>Marriage Story</i> Understands That No One Outside a Marriage Can Know the Truth of It

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story Understands That No One Outside a Marriage Can Know the Truth of It

I n the days when movie stars used to appear in mainstream melodramas made for grownups—when we used to have mainstream melodramas made for grownups—it meant something to watch suffering play out on a deeply familiar face. Joan Crawford, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, William Holden: With their charisma and their carriage, in their Hollywood-royalty clothes, these people were spectacular and special creatures—surely, they couldn’t be as susceptible to emotional torment as we mere mortals are. But then, as you watched them in character, you’d see their hearts breaking or their spirits being crushed, and the sting was acute. They reminded you that no one is too beautiful to feel pain.

That’s the effect of watching Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, two of our own most appealing modern movie stars, in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s canny and cutting Marriage Story, a Netflix release playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival. Johansson and Driver play Nicole and Charlie, the two halves of a disintegrating couple: He’s a smart, modestly successful theater director about to debut his first show on Broadway. She’s his star actor, enormously gifted but overshadowed by her husband’s ambition and outsized confidence, both of which shine right through his aw-shucks demeanor. Nicole and Charlie have a son together, Henry (Azhy Robertson), whom they clearly adore. But things have gone jaggedly wrong between them. Nicole is about to leave the family’s home in New York for Los Angeles, where she’ll be filming a TV pilot—it’s a big deal for her, a chance to break off a little piece of fame for herself, though she senses Charlie looks down on the project. (He kind of does.) She’ll be taking Henry with her, and although the understanding is that the two will return to New York after her work is done, the act of dissolving the marriage is already in progress.

Nicole and Charlie have made it clear to each other and to everyone else that their split is going to be friendly and breezy, with minimal impact on Henry. But once Nicole reaches Los Angeles, the proceedings escalate. She connects with an almost diabolically shrewd divorce lawyer, Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern, in a performance as cleanly chiseled as her collarbones), who reassures her that this split can be everything that she desires—but that she should also get as much as she can, moneywise and custody-wise, out of the deal.

Charlie doesn’t know what hit him; actually, it takes forever for him to realize that anything has hit him at all. He attempts to hire an expensive shark of a lawyer (a disarmingly intense Ray Liotta), only to back off in favor of a sweetpea old-timer (Alan Alda, characteristically affable) who’s more in tune with his own trusting nature. Before long, Charlie and Nicole are barely speaking, and Nora, speaking in savvy lawyerese cloaked in the soothing tones of a self-help guru, is calling the shots. The savagery seems one-sided at first, driven mostly by Nicole’s desire to stay in Los Angeles and keep her son with her—you wonder when Charlie is going to stop walking around with that invisible “Kick me!” sign taped to his back. There’s a way in which Baumbach seems to want to tip the scales of sympathy toward the guy in the story—Nicole’s behavior sometimes comes off as a little too ruthless.

But Charlie finally gets the full picture, and realizes that no matter what, he wants his son to know he fought for him. And if Baumbach has, until this point, only signaled that these two characters will inflict great damage and pain upon one another, this is where he really opens the door to the sufferdome. Driver’s features are rubbery, agile, insanely likable—he’s got the kind of nose babies love to grab. To see Charlie close down—to see his face as swollen as a thundercloud with anguish and anger—is to see a movie star channel the very things we’ve all, at one time or another, struggled to banish or at least suppress. Driver ferries Baumbauch’s super-cerebral script—Baumbach could never not be cerebral —to a place beyond thinking, where raw emotion becomes an entropic, hurricane swirl.

Johansson’s mode is different but no less affecting. Her face is as expressive as Driver’s, but she sends feeling out in packets of light—one minute she bathes you in a pale, warm nightlight glow, a reassurance that all is right with the world; the next might be a power-surge flash, as if some unseen, wrathful goddess were sending lightning bolts to Earth through her fingertips. But mostly, Nicole guards her feelings more closely than Charlie does, and her subterranean vulnerability is like a heartbeat you can see. Baumbach is working with an ace cinematographer here, Robbie Ryan, who opens up a great deal of air around Johansson—uncrowded, she’s free to move and breathe, putting every emotional color on display.

Nicole and Charlie spar and claw at each other, drawing figurative blood if not the real kind. (At one point, Charlie semi-inadvertently slices into one of his own veins.) Their mutual antagonism is wrenching to watch because they, and Baumbach, have already shown us what things were like in better times. The movie’s opening is a catalog of the types of things that, in the best circumstances, can keep people bonded for life. Before seeing a marriage arbitrator, Charlie and Nicole have been asked to draw up a list of things that each loves about the other, and we hear these lists read in the character’s voices. “He’s very clear about what he wants, unlike me, who can’t always tell,” Nicole says of Charlie. Charlie praises Nicole’s generosity, her ability to feel everything so deeply. “She cuts all our hair,” he adds, and in an accompanying flashback we see her in action, going to work with the scissors as wisps of her loved ones’ hair fall to the floor. The image is so casual and quotidian that it nearly destroys you. This is what a marriage looks like when it works. But you can never adequately capture what destroys a marriage, because that unpredictable beast is the most camera-shy of gremlins.

When Marriage Story was announced, beard-strokers everywhere—even those with no literal beards to stroke—mused that this movie must surely be drawn from Baumbach’s experience splitting with his former wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, with whom he has a child. Of course! Probably. Why not? Baumbach has already made one autobiographical work, in 2005, with The Squid and the Whale , drawn from his experience of his parents’ divorce when he was a child ; it’s hardly unthinkable that he might make another. But if Baumbach has embedded any deeply personal elements in Marriage Story, they feel more like open secrets than confessional revelations. I suspect almost anyone who has dissolved a seemingly perfect union can relate to at least some of Marriage Story, especially if there are children involved. As a filmmaker, Baumbach’s smartest move here is that he never explains exactly how or what went wrong between these two, people whose sine waves seem as in sync as a pair of dolphins swimming in the sea. No one outside a marriage can know the truth of it; that’s a secret meant only for those inside. If you think you can squeeze a camera in there, you’re an endoscopic surgeon, not a filmmaker—and Baumbach would be the first to tell you he’s just the latter.

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What’s Missing from the Brilliant “Marriage Story”

Noah Baumbach’s new film, “ Marriage Story ” (currently in theatres, and coming to Netflix on December 6th), isn’t so much a story of a marriage as it is a story of stories—of the stories that are told about a marriage as it dies, the role of those stories in the lives of those who are soon to be exes, and, above all, the frameworks that give rise to those stories and prove to be inseparable from their substance. Baumbach’s prime strength as a director is his vision of talk as action. “Marriage Story” is his strongest film because it turns the very basis for that talk into a crucial part of the action—and it goes in surprising directions to reveal the personal importance of such talk and the high price (both literally and emotionally) that its protagonists pay to unleash it.

The movie begins with an elegant ruse: a pair of voice-over monologues by its married couple, Charlie Barber ( Adam Driver ) and Nicole Ryder Barber (Scarlett Johansson). The monologues detail what each loves about the other: Charlie cites Nicole’s emotional understanding, familial commitment, wide range of skills, personal intensity, total dedication to their son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), and willingness to spurn a burgeoning career as a movie star to work with Charlie in the theatre. Nicole speaks of Charlie’s self-sufficiency, his avidity, his orderliness, his paternal devotion, his strength as a “self-made” man who came to New York from a troubled family and made the theatre—a company that he founded—his home.

These speeches prove quickly to be, in effect, letters never sent, spoken only internally by the two characters. Nicole and Charlie wrote them at the recommendation of a separation mediator, in order to read them aloud at a session in his office. But when the mediator (Robert Smigel) asks them to begin, Nicole puts a stop to the process by refusing to read her piece or to hear Charlie read his. Nicole’s refusal suggests the fragility of her state of mind—the risk that, in reaffirming the couple’s frayed bond, she’ll lose the power to sever it. In effect, the entire movie is one of duelling monologues, spoken and unspoken: two hours of sharp, painful, witty, and elegant talk that is nonetheless rooted in the impossibility of communication. Baumbach presents the elusive nature of love, the ineffable spark at its core and the realm of practicalities by which it’s defined and realized. He testifies to the phrase by Pierre Reverdy made famous by Jean Cocteau: “There’s no such thing as love, there’s only proof of love.”

Though it long remains unclear why the couple is divorcing, it’s clear that Nicole’s dissatisfaction is driving the process. The couple have collaborated on a new production of “Electra” that’s about to move to Broadway—but without Nicole in the lead role. She is marking the separation by relocating to Los Angeles, her home town, for a role in a TV pilot. She moves back in with her mother, Sandra (Julie Hagerty), an actress, and her sister, Cassie (Merritt Wever), also an actress. She gets to work on the TV show, and displays her keen dramatic instincts in the face of oblivious instructions from a studio director. The show’s producer, Carol (Sarah Jones), invites Nicole to join the writers’ room, but she responds that she’d rather direct. Carol also offers her the name of a good divorce lawyer, Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), unaware that Nicole and Charlie had promised each other not to hire counsel.

But Nicole does consult with Nora, and from the time of their first meeting Nora more or less dominates the rest of the film with her lethal effectiveness and wide-ranging insight. When Nora tells Nicole that the point of their meeting is to state plainly what she herself wants, Nicole’s frustrations come out along with her reminiscences. She describes how she and Charlie met and instantly fell in love when she was about twenty, a young Hollywood star in a frivolous movie, and he was a talented young stage actor. She joined his theatre company, lent her name to it, brought attention to it—and soon, she says, it was Charlie who became “the draw.” Her prominence shrank, his status rose, and all the while she was fitting into his life—his apartment—leaving her with little identity. He rejected all her suggestions that they live in Los Angeles, and hardly cared that she was cast in the lead of a major TV pilot. She felt that her desires, her interests, and her personality had become subordinated to his, effaced by him—even as he was putting scenes from their marriage and remarks that she made into his plays. It’s almost as an afterthought that Nicole mentions that Charlie had an affair with a co-worker, a stage manager named Mary Ann (Brooke Bloom).

Nora’s sugar-sparkled mien reflects her clear and combative sense of what women are up against. She deploys her legal skills to win for her female clients in court a measure of the equality and the fairness that they’ve been denied in the more amorphous (and less supervised) settings of work and family. She freely admits that “the system rewards bad behavior,” and her version of this behavior is to reframe Nicole’s view of Charlie and their marriage in order to present as devastatingly negative a portrait as possible, in the interest of making maximal claims regarding property and custody and other matters of contention—above all, in the interest of helping Nicole realize her long-stifled plans and desires.

As the legal clash heats up, with Charlie in New York and Nicole in Los Angeles, “Marriage Story” becomes a tale of two cities and of two forms of media, television and theatre. (Movies are only in the deep background.) Nicole wants to live in Los Angeles and pursue the onscreen career that she’d turned her back on when she decided to be with Charlie in New York. She wants not only to act but also to direct. More than anything, she wants to live away from Charlie’s casually and cavalierly dominating presence.

The crux of their dispute is the custody of Henry. Charlie is no less devoted to him than Nicole is, but Nicole’s decision to reside in California more or less guarantees that the boy will live there with her, and Charlie will have to fly over for periodic visits or receive him for vacations—unless he himself moves. That’s why Charlie’s baseline demand is for Nicole and Henry to return to New York after her series is filmed. Baumbach, presenting Charlie’s perspective as a New York resident with a theatre company and a major production in the works, and his claim that Nicole, too, is a New York resident, doesn’t stint on the practical inconveniences of legal procedures to make such a case—the high cost of a lawyer (Charlie consults one who requires a twenty-five-thousand-dollar retainer), the sheer inconvenience of the related travel, and the stress of the contention (including the fear of being spied on by a private detective).

Charlie’s empathetic, humane lawyer, Bert (Alan Alda), explains the legal system of divorce to Charlie—it’s designed, he says, to protect poor and abused women from deadbeat husbands. And, though Nicole is far from poor and Charlie isn’t a deadbeat, what emerges is that she is, in a crucial way, abused—and that the circumstances of her marriage led her to feel not merely unhappy but voiceless. Nora and the legal system enable Nicole to tell her story seemingly for the first time. The system also weaponizes that story, turning it into an instrument of power. Part of that power involves the tailoring and reshaping of the story to satisfy the anticipated desires of the legal system, whether judges or court-appointed examiners. One key subplot involves Charlie’s clumsy effort to put on a show of fit parenthood for one such expert (played by Martha Kelly), and Nora’s effort to tailor Nicole’s personal narrative to satisfy the same expert. As part of that effort, Nora delivers a monologue regarding the excessive, unfair, and deeply ingrained expectations placed on mothers, a declaration of lucid observation and just anger that, at both screenings I’ve attended, was received in the theatre with applause.

Some of the best twists in the movie involve lawyerly battles (a third, played by Ray Liotta, is also involved). Avoiding spoilers: in the course of legal hearings, Nicole has the sense that her point of view, in Nora’s reshaping of it, is finally being heard by Charlie. Her view of him, of her life with him, of their marriage, is hitting home, wounding his pride, shattering his self-image, bursting his own veneer of amicability, and tapping into his own repressed torrent of frustrations. (He also vents his turmoil and confusion in a piano-bar rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s song “Being Alive”; Driver delivers the song in a few ardent long takes, which also sparked movie-house applause at both screenings.)

Baumbach offers, throughout the film, a warm-hearted and sharply comedic set of behavioral nuances and fillips of dialogue, a finely wrought network of family relationships and work connections. He displays the vanities and uncertainties, the kindnesses and the missteps that evoke the sense of full and complex lives. Yet that intricate texture is also both fragile and diaphanous, revealing in action the frameworks that give it definition. In Baumbach’s vision, when that fine fabric of daily life is rent by emotional turmoil, those frameworks show through all the more conspicuously. Theatre is one such structure; family is another; and the law turns out to be another such structure, and a critical one, which—for all its inconveniences, absurdities, distortions, and pressures—offers a crucial spark and form for life-changing emotional revelations and recognitions.

That’s why, when the couple’s pent-up passions emerge in a scene of unstructured, unmediated personal confrontation, what is revealed is a horror, one that, in its monstrosity, shows, once and for all, exactly why the marriage has ended. Nicole speaks her mind and conveys her experiences and feelings, more or less rephrasing what had emerged in her talks with Nora. Charlie’s retorts are cruel, hateful, self-centered, and abusive. They both lash out in anger, but Nicole starts from a baseline complaint—that Charlie repressed her individuality—and his arrogant rejection of her claim merely demonstrates its validity. If the terrifying scene has a peaceful conclusion, it’s one that’s dramatically earned: it defines the movie’s arc, presenting the confirmation of Nicole’s perspective. The outburst’s chaotically flying elements will settle back into order in the legal framework—not to mention the artistic one.

It’s impossible to ignore parallels between Baumbach’s life and his work. As reported by Ian Parker in his Profile of Baumbach in The New Yorker , in 2013, Baumbach was married to the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh for five years. (Leigh, of course, comes from a notable family of movie people, as does Nicole.) Baumbach and Leigh separated in 2010, soon after the birth of their son. The following year, Baumbach and the actress, writer, and director Greta Gerwig began a relationship. They had worked together on his movie “Greenberg,” which was filmed in 2009; as Parker reports, “Baumbach and Gerwig firmly place the start of their romance at a point after his separation,” and adds, “Baumbach thinks that aspects of his divorce might eventually appear in his work.”

What’s peculiar about the presentation of Nicole and Charlie’s divorce, from the perspective of a male director who, like Charlie, uses aspects of his personal relationships in his work, is (spoiler alert) the happy ending. Nicole enjoys a fulfilling personal life and great professional success apart from Charlie in her new life, and this cuts both ways. It’s simultaneously a tribute to her untapped abilities and an accusation levied against Charlie for not acknowledging or fostering them, but it also lets the character behind the scenes—the director, Noah Baumbach, who in real life went through a divorce from a major actress—off the hook. In effect, the filmmaker tells the world, she’s better off without me.

That’s also where “Marriage Story” reveals its limitations. Baumbach’s canny and intricate construction of the film’s action and dialogue makes “Marriage Story” his most developed and original film. But he doesn’t risk breaking his own frames to acknowledge the offscreen dramas, the lives behind the characters, and what his movie implies for them. Charlie is presented as a dramatist who makes use of his and Nicole’s private life in his own work; the implications are nowhere in the movie. It’s that opacity to itself that blocks the way for “Marriage Story” to the summit of cinematic achievement.

‘Marriage Story’ review: A great movie you may never want to see again

Noah Baumbach’s remarkably scripted and spectacularly acted “Marriage Story” might just as well have been called “End of a Marriage Story.” It might also be a great movie I never want to see again, though it is too early to tell: Its nuclear-family fallout has not quite settled.

“Marriage Story” makes observations that are probably priceless in a world where divorce has become so common that it is quite a bit like death: It happens every day. It goes virtually unnoticed by the people who are not directly affected. It lays waste to the ones who are.

Noah Baumbach’s remarkably scripted new film might just as well have been called “End of a Marriage Story.”

With a score by Randy Newman and supporting cast that includes Wallace Shawn, Brooke Bloom, Alan Alda and Julie Hagerty, the film also includes a lot of what might be called unbecoming conduct. (“The system rewards bad behavior,” says the shark-like lawyer Nora Fanshaw, played by force-of-nature Laura Dern.) It also stars movie man of the moment Adam Driver , along with Scarlett Johansson. He is a director named Charlie, she is an actress named Nicole, and both are parents to Henry (Azhy Robertson), who is, appropriately, uncharming: A child whose parents are splitting up should not have to be Justin Henry in “Kramer vs. Kramer” (a film with obvious parallels) to earn our sympathy.

Few of the characters go morally unscathed in what is a sometimes harrowing trip to family court. One who does is Bert (played by Alda), the slightly doddering attorney whom Charlie first hires. He is given the film’s best line: “Criminal lawyers see bad people at their best; divorce lawyers see good people at their worst.” Among the points that Baumbach is making—especially by having performers play performers—is that life is an act, and the poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage often does so shoehorned into unfamiliar and even hostile parts.

Few of the characters go morally unscathed in what is a sometimes harrowing trip to family court.

Nicole, for instance, has decided that being a wife to Charlie has finally meant sacrificing too much of herself. Charlie, though temperamentally inclined to a degree of self-doubt, thought he was doing O.K. Both are equally wrong. They resist falling into the pit of recriminations and legalistic dirty pool as long as they can. But they have attorneys, so they are lost.

Charlie eventually ends up with Jay, a more or less stereotypical courtroom carnivore played by a very persuasive Ray Liotta. Nicole’s lawyer, Nora, who is a stand-in for the devil, resorts to socio-religious arguments in getting Nicole to embrace her more ruthless instincts and present herself to the court as squeaky clean and righteously maternal. After all, Nora says, the standard by which women are judged within “our Judeo-Christian whatever” is based on the Virgin Mary. “She’s a virgin who gives birth,” sputters Nora, who, prolonging the metaphor, says, “God is the father and God doesn’t show up.” Meaning that men get away with everything.

The way viewers read “Marriage Story” may well come down to what sex they are. 

Charlie does not seem able to get away with anything. He is no angel, but he wins our sympathy. At least I think he does. The way viewers read “Marriage Story” may well come down to what sex they are and what their romantic-marital-legal experience has been. Both Driver and Johansson give epic performances. She has what felt like an uninterrupted, 10-or-so-minute scene at the film’s beginning during which Nicole explains her plight. It feels, to some degree, like an improvisation at the Actors Studio, but that is the point. She is an actress who commits herself to a role, and the role she has now chosen is divorcée. Charlie, given an emotionally naked portrayal by Driver, is less able to hide, though both should, occasionally. There is a scene toward the end of the film in which Charlie and Nicole have an understandable but nevertheless embarrassing meltdown that will have audiences feeling like intruders. “Whew,” I said to myself. “This is a movie, isn’t it?”

Baumbach’s own divorce from the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh may have inspired this film, and this is only worth mentioning because “Marriage Story” so profoundly feels sprung from someone’s real-life experience. At the same time, we are keenly aware that people are acting—and always are. The double-montage introduction, which serves as a flashback to the blissful years of being “Charlie and Nicole,” partners in both work and life, is pure Woody Allen, with idealized New York people tossing about bon mots and only doing significant work, when they do work, their comings and going executed with perfect timing. The whole thing smacks of one of those New York Times Style features—one of which is actually framed on a wall, about Charlie and Nicole, headlined “Scenes from a Marriage.”

The Bergman film of the same name was a big influence on Allen, and Allen is an influence on Baumbach. “Marriage Story” might have been the nightmare sequel to “Annie Hall,” if Annie and Alvy Singer weren’t old enough now to be Charlie and Nicole’s grandparents (and had actually gotten married). At the risk of prolonging the literary allusion above, “Marriage Story” is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing short of a reappraisal of marriage and divorce and the casualness with which both are entered into. It also suggests, without saying so, that when one applies for a marriage license there ought to be a test.

John Anderson is a television critic for The Wall Street Journal and a contributor to The New York Times.

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