I don't have a non shitty link handy but the NYT op ed unfavourably comparing this to Kramer vs Kramer depressed me, and not in the intended fashion
A 40-year-old movie proves more progressive about relationships than one from 2019.This essay includes spoilers for “Marriage Story.”
In Noah Baumbach’s film “Marriage Story,” Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) explains to her divorce lawyer, Nora (Laura Dern), why she’s ending her marriage.
In the early stages of their relationship, Nicole abandoned an acting career in Hollywood to move to New York City with her husband, Charlie, an up-and-coming director, and star in his theater productions. She feels that the contributions from Charlie (Adam Driver) haven’t been equal. As his career ascended, she felt “smaller,” and he refused to support her desire to eventually move back to Los Angeles so she could be closer to her family and return to screen acting.
“It would be strange if he turned to me and said, ‘What do you want to do today?’” Nicole tells Nora.
“Marriage Story” depicts the couple’s dissolution as a bitter, emotional battle with yelling, tears and many monologues. Nicole moves back to Los Angeles with their 8-year-old son to shoot a TV pilot, and a bicoastal custody fight ensues. It’s less a film about one particular divorce and more a commentary on divorce itself. And in keeping with our era, a gender imbalance is the main topic of both conversation and controversy, and seems to be the main reason for Nicole and Charlie’s split.
“The idea of a good father was created, like, 30 years ago,” Nora declares as she preps Nicole for an interview with the case worker who will observe her and her son at home. Even so, Nora continues, society still sets impossibly high expectations for mothers while fathers get away with making mistakes and doing as little as possible. Perhaps unintentionally, “Marriage Story” reinforces that double standard: As a parent, Nicole is more present and attentive than Charlie, who is too wrapped up in his own grandiose artistic vision to consider the lives and perspectives of others — yet by the end of the film, Charlie hasn’t been forced to acknowledge his neglect as a husband or father.
Back in 1979, a good 10 years before Nora’s estimated emergence of the hands-on “good father” narrative, there was a film that critiqued culture’s archaic concept of the father as a stoic provider: Robert Benton’s divorce drama “Kramer vs. Kramer.” As Ted Kramer, Dustin Hoffman portrays a parent who learns from his mistakes and grows emotionally.
This new kind of father wasn’t created in a vacuum. Ted’s journey begins with his wife, Joanna (Meryl Streep), rejecting him and the gender divide within their marriage — she feels suffocated by her role as a wife and mother, and exhibits signs of extreme depression. As she stands in the hallway outside their apartment, she begs him not to stop her from leaving. “Don’t make me go in there,” she says. “If you do, I swear one day next week, maybe next year, I don’t know, I’ll go right out the window.”
Once Joanna is gone, Ted is forced to perform all the tasks he previously left to his wife. As he juggles child care and his career, he learns that parenting is, in fact, a full-time job.
One day, Ted is late to pick up his son, Billy, which leads to a tantrum. “All the other mothers were there before you,” Billy says while glaring at his father. Ted is softened by the outburst. He starts to take his parenting duties more seriously and finds himself bonding with another parent who was left by her spouse.
Chastened after yet another tantrum, Ted opens up to Billy about his shortcomings as a husband and father: “I think the reason Mommy left is because for a long time now I kept trying to make her be a certain kind of person, Billy, a certain kind of wife I thought she was supposed to be. And she just wasn’t like that.” Ted goes on to explain that he didn’t listen to her when she tried to talk about their problems because he was “too wrapped up” in thinking about himself.
Charlie exhibits no such self-reflection in “Marriage Story.” During one blistering argument, Nicole tries but fails to get him to acknowledge his neglect; it’s heartbreaking to watch her explain to Charlie how he steam-rolled her into staying in New York away from her family and the Hollywood career she desperately wanted to continue to pursue. It’s even sadder to watch as her mother and sister, who don’t understand why she’s leaving Charlie, encourage her to stay with him.
Nora is the only one in Nicole’s corner, pointing out her client’s contributions to Charlie’s work and her involvement as a parent. Nora acts as a cheerleader, reminding Nicole of her worth whenever she expresses doubt over Nora’s cutthroat methods. As Nora, Ms. Dern seems to delight in the opportunity to highlight the hypocrisy of men and their continued adherence to a sexist, classically heteronormative worldview.
But the director, Mr. Baumbach, casts Nora’s point of view in a harsh light, with her feminist speeches framed like villain monologues. In the last act of the film, Nora announces that she cut a deal with Charlie’s lawyers that gives Nicole custody 55 percent of the time whenever Charlie is visiting Los Angeles. “I didn’t want him to be able to say he got 50-50,” she says, gloating.
Even though “Marriage Story” is ostensibly on Nicole’s side, she isn’t given the same sympathy-churning emotional beats afforded to her ex-husband. Charlie never apologizes for his behavior, though he does perform “Being Alive,” from the Stephen Sondheim musical “Company.” In the show, the song finds the lead character at first rejecting commitment, but soon realizing that everything that makes a relationship challenging can also be fulfilling. Mr. Driver’s performance of the song is stirring, but its context feels unearned.
This isn’t surprising, considering Mr. Baumbach also made “The Squid and the Whale,” which also has a hard time humanizing its ex-wife character (played by Laura Linney). And if we look elsewhere in cinematic history, we can find many examples of women leaving their husbands and being depicted as cold for doing so: Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Rain People”; Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”; Danny DeVito’s dark comedy “The War of the Roses,” in which the wife’s desperate desire for independence is exhibited as a homicidal hatred for her controlling husband.
It can be disheartening to watch these tropes play out over and over again without filmmakers seriously reflecting on the men’s treatment of their spouses. That’s part of what makes “Kramer vs. Kramer” endure all these years later — it imagines a male character who learns to grow and recognizes the part he played in the dissolution of his marriage. Notably, Meryl Streep said she pushed for more nuance and sympathy for her character in the script, while dealing with on-set harassment from Mr. Hoffman, who unexpectedly slapped her before a scene.
That film’s troubling back story hews closely to the struggle of Nicole in “Marriage Story”: a woman fighting for autonomy under the watchful eye of a celebrated male artist in an industry that celebrates his volatility. In 2019, Mr. Baumbach’s meditationserves as a reminder of how little has changed for women, on and off screen.
Jourdain Searles (@jourdayen) is a writer and performer.