Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story

moralism is kinda silly to use on Baumbach and not, say, Bergman, who wasn't unimpeachably noble toward his women in his life

i'm less concerned by the moralism and more by the navel-gazing and woe-is-me rich white guy meanderings. great actors help but you better have a REALLY good script and i don't think baumbach generally does much better than okay.

this was better than OK. It's true he tends to make films about well-off artists, that's whatcha get.

then again i thought Meyerowitz had a sterling Sandler performance.

(and a family w/ members at differing levels of financial/professional security)

Well-off artists are his bread and butter. It would be weird to see him make a movie about people who are genuinely struggling to get by and I doubt it'd be any good. (The solution of course is to let more working-class ppl make movies that get distributed, but good luck with that.)

my issue is the writing as well- the movie is so jejune and MOR in its content & conclusions, coming from a guy whose personal life is way more fucked up and interesting. I just think it's a cowardly film, especially seeing it a week after Shia LaBeouf's Honey Boy, which isn't entirely successful, but it's much more interesting and unique and affecting, and really fucking brave.

I haven't seen Honey Boy yet but I don't really buy the autobiographical readings this movie is getting

i don't require him to alter his subject (and definitely not to "people struggling to get by") to take him seriously; I'm just saying I have no interest in pursuing Baumbach's stated metier so i need him to really wow me to keep my attention which he most certainly has not up until now.
Except here he is with a massive culture-crossing statement so i feel i gotta try. the fault is likely mine.

I mean it's totally fair and fine to be sick of that subject matter area!

yes it is

just as i am sick of QT's veneration of cultural sputum

Honey Boy is like spending 89 minutes in a room with Stephen Miller playing with spray dye.

ouch

this is the most i've ever liked a baumbach film. everything really works

looking forward to seeing it

I could've used more ScarJo and less of the Driver breakdown scene in which she comforts him, especially since it's more likely that she would've moved toward him, stopped, changed her mind, and walked away.

refereed a lotta knockdown dragouts?

I can't self-referee.

I was confused by your ref to "Driver breakdown scene" until I figured out you meant the big fight scene. It's a dual breakdown if anything, surely?

I think it's fine that the film is more from his POV. Men relate to and understand men more than they do women. That's why women filmmakers are better at representing women.

definitely a dual breakdown that's also a complete breakdown in language and a catharsis, and so i think it's appropriate they embrace

film is to the correct degree aware of itself as a film imo

i also think scarjo's initial scene with dern is so powerful that i didn't really notice we were with driver more

Alan Alda microwaving his lunch while strategizing with Driver = small comedy classic.

also the fact that we were with driver more just got me acquainted with what an obstinate shithead his character often is, as much as he is also sympathetic, bc the characters in this film are really well drawn imo (i loved scarjo's family)

oh god i loved alda in this so much

Good interview with Baumbach, including his choices on POV shifts. (When Charlie gets the Macarthur, we're seeing it from Nicole's POV not seeing the moment where he finds out. Same with when he's served.)

This movie is great! Lots of laffs!

My only complaints are the like four or five edits that were super melodramatic and the dogshit Randy Newman score, but just great script, powerhouse acting, lots of great lines, good small moments, good big moments

Can’t stop thinking about how the last straw for Scarlett’s character in “Marriage Story” was her husband didn’t know her phone number. In 2019. I BARELY know my own phone number. If you’re not my parents or the parents of my childhood best friend, I don’t know those digits.

— KatieEllen Humphries (@MsKatieEllen) December 8, 2019

http://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/noah-baumbach-music/

When I think about Bert Jansch in The Squid and the Whale, and Karen Dalton and Jorma Kaukonen in Margot at the Wedding, not an especially interesting list.

Yes! I had the same thought! Thanks for the reminder. He's a shitty writer!

I don't think it's a dishonest movie anymore though. Just nothing left for me besides the performances. It even looked lousy, at its worst looked like that one fuckin Instagram filter that makes beige look like piss.

xp

well!

idgi was your tv dying

i thought a lot abt the phone number line also, that tweet statement feels like such a universal truth that i cant believe it wasnt brought up to baumbach & the line made it in anyway so... idk

i feel bad for the twitter person barely knowing their own phone number, you still need it for a lot of things

also i can't go in on this movie for bad writing at all, the letter writing that opens and closes it is phenomenal and it's so fucking funny throughout

the movie looked fine! no idea what's wrong with fb's tv/computer/phone/whatever

director eating crackers...

Baumbach is not a great visual stylist or whatever, but it looked perfectly fine. No worse than usual. No worse than all the rest of the American Oscar industry focused mainly on narrative and acting.

a lot of visual flair to be had in the way both the camera moves and the way the actors move within the shot in this film imo

that was not a great sentence but tbf i’m not awake

I didn't need this to look like Mandy or whatever. (otoh...)

i think i loved most when this film got explicitly stagey: scarjo walking around dern's office, driver and alda gravitating toward the microwave (what a detail imo), the argument/breakdown, driver's sondheim performance. it's not a play within a play or anything like that but it's more like there's an intriguingly light meta-transparency covering everything, like as soon as the director's distracted from his work it suddenly dictates the pace and choreography of his divorce. it keeps the movie from being bogged down by excruciating realism, and honestly in these scenes the visual, the text, and the performances combine into idk something i'd call cinema? it's powerful, and it feels like baumbach's career has been building toward this since kicking and screaming. the one scene from frances ha that stuck with me is the one of her walking three hundred blocks for an atm just to get cash for a cash-only restaurant; it's a moment that's so perfectly exaggerated that it feels more true than truth. and this film feels like a sequence of similarly exaggerated truths that, because of the way they're exaggerated, feel way more personally true (not necessarily personally true for noah baumbach, whose biography i don't care about, but personally true for me)

someone should program a double feature of this and possession

little bits like Laura Dern's dropping Tom Petty's name when as an attorney she shouldn't have did work in that hyper-realist vein

and of course ScarJo and Driver would know the differences b/w Station to Station and Let's Dance-era Bowie costumes.

also: the way Baumbach choreographs the kitchen scene in which ScarJo's sister is supposed to serve him.

couldn't help but recall during the Halloween scenes that ScarJo recorded with Bowie

also: the way Baumbach choreographs the kitchen scene in which ScarJo's sister is supposed to serve him.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, December 10, 2019 7:41 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is SO good

honestly I could have used more of everyone in this movie who wasn't ScarJo/Driver

really any scene with Julie Hagerty, whose comic style depends on a hyper-posed airheadedness.

one of the strongest supporting casts i can think of

there's something wrong with this man

loool

Very interesting opinion on this movie about relationships from a guy with multiple sexual misconduct allegations

A Divorce Story? More like A Divorce Movie!

and he got the movie title wrong!

The film “The Jaws” (1975) should instead have been named “The Shark That Kills People”

Ray Liotta kills in this! Perfect