As a Child of Divorce, I Don't Think "Marriage Story" Is Devastating—It's Hopeful (2024)

• Since Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story debuted on Netflix on December 6, it's earned both Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations, with one reviewer saying it's "the most devastating portrayal of divorce ever committed to film."
• But as a child of divorce, OprahMag.com deputy editor Brie Schwartz argues that Marriage Story is actually much more "hopeful" than the real thing.
  

“You’ll never know when the happy cat O.J. will strike again,” a voice threatened on the phone before hanging up.

“That sounded like daddy. What did he mean?” I asked my mom.

“It means your father’s drunk and wants to kill me,” she deadpanned, and resumed marinating chicken.

I spent the rest of that day crossing my 10-year-old fingers and clinging to my mother. I thought that if I kept by her side with my wishful hands concealed, no homicidal kitties or ex-husbands would harm her. This was a standard adolescent afternoon. The phone was something to be feared in my home; behind each ring was a bill collector, a divorce attorney, or my father, waiting to engage me in a conversation my mother swore he’d use against me in family court. She recorded our calls, just in case.

When he rang, my mom insisted that I recite "If you don’t bring a child support check this weekend, it’ll prove that you don’t love me.” The script was written near the phone as a reminder.

“You’re just a clone of your mom,” he’d bark. Then I’d hear him take a drag of his cigarette and a swig of something, probably brown. “Your father wants you to starve to death!” was my mother's response from downstairs where she was tapped into our kitchen landline. Starve? I was chubby! And besides, couldn’t I just eat my new Kate Spade hand bag?

It was scenes like these that I imagined I’d walk into before seeing “the most devastating portrayal of divorce ever committed to film,” as one reddit reviewer said about Marriage Story. Instead, I was delivered a portrait of a mostly average dissolution of a relationship. One that, despite a meme-generating screaming match in which Adam Driver’s near-perfect face is squeezed like a spit-covered stress ball, is otherwise unmoving.

But a few days after watching the film—and of reading Twitter users pontificating over whether it's either incredibly poignant or incredibly boring—I'm beginning to wonder if that's exactly the point: Relationships don’t always end cinematically.

Writer and director Noah Baumbach is a critical darling, known largely for his slice of life studies on (white) middle class ennui (While We’re Young) or his focus on rudderless, but sometimes charming hipsters (Frances Ha). Marriage Story centers again on two self-indulgent characters: Charlie (Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), a former LA-based actress who realizes she’s no longer happy simply being a “wife and mother” to their eight-year-old son, Henry, or the muse to Charlie and his New York theater company.

Simply put, Charlie and Nicole are #overit, which is why she relegates all 6′ 2″ alabaster inches of him to the couch. They exchange cool barbs, partially driven by the fact that she resents him for giving up her burgeoning film career (though Baumbach presents her teen stardom with mockery) to perform in his avant-garde, downtown shows. His art, according to her, is all that he has the capacity to be passionate about. But that’s okay, because she leaves cabinets open and is sexually withholding. Match point.

While Nicole and Charlie’s 136-minute journey to signing on the dotted divorce line was agonizing for them (which is made clear by plenty of monologues), what we were essentially watching was two people getting their happy endings. Each half of the couple got a clean break to pursue their dreams without involving their child in their vitriol. (I bet even if Henry could watch this one day, he’d feel nothing, too.)

But I'm not sure there's anything actually “devastating” about an empowered young-ish woman whose able to move back in with her moneyed mother while she’s reinventing herself and her career. Nicole's getting the life she wanted before she married a fellow she admits she shouldn’t have been with in the first place. Meanwhile, it was hard for me to feel any flick of emotion for a man who now gets to channel all of that disappointment into his art, which is clearly his priority—and first love.

Is the film a realistic rendering of the messy (and expensive) divorce process and how meddling attorneys can turn vulnerable people into their hostile alter egos? Yes. An artful depiction of how gutting it can be when you imagine your life will go in one direction and then…it doesn’t? Well played, Baumbach. But worthy of a tear? Not for me, at least. Why cry over characters who made a sensible choice and were able to move on relatively amicably?

I, of course recognize that the film could be triggering for some. I'm not a monster. Heck, if there was a scene in which Charlie splayed himself in front of Nicole’s car like an intoxicated snow angel so Nicole couldn’t drive Henry away on Charlie’s visitation day while Henry called 9-1-1 because he didn’t know what else to do, I would have been triggered, too. (I remember that happening 26 years ago more vividly than any of Baumbach's incisive lines.)

But instead of being “sad,” or "devastating," Marriage Story is like an old high school friend—one you only stick with out of some odd sense of loyalty. You listen sympathetically and order more wine. Maybe you’ve been there and can fully relate, even if you’re secretly wondering why she’s whining because you've experienced much worse.

In a modern sense, Charlie and Nicole did get a “Hollywood” ending. Sure, they didn’t die peacefully in bed spooning after celebrating their 103^rd birthday, but the movie sets up that possibility. No, it won’t happen for Charlie and Nicole, but they can both have that with someone else. They can move on to fresh, doting partners who’ll listen attentively to their soliloquies—which it seems is all they ever hoped for.

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