Page 60 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

Snatchers put a fresh coat of frost on his young apart. That’s the good stuff.” And watching
YOU CAN
ALMOST
SEE THE
INVOLUNTARY
TWITCH OF
A CHILL
COURSING
THROUGH
HIM.
“It really was a childhood trauma for me,”
Noah Baumbach says. “It has come up in ther-
apy my entire life. It really messed me up. It
messed me up.”
For an instant, you assume, understand-
ably, that Baumbach is talking about the di-
vorce of his parents, film critic Georgia Brown
and experimental novelist Jonathan Baum-
bach, back in the 1980s. But it’s not that sim- Marriage Story opens
ple. Baumbach is actually talking about go-
ing to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers—the
creeped-out, dread-soaked 1978 version star-
ring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, and
Jeff Goldblum—when he was a kid in Brook-
lyn, just as the torn seams of his parents’ mar- abruptly shifts, and shifts again, as Baum-
riage were becoming visible. “The notion of
people seeming the same but not being what
they present themselves to be was very scary
to me,” Baumbach goes on. “I think I picked
up on that through Body Snatchers. The con-
cept of it just scared me so much....I was prob- hard they try to stick to their original script
ably nine at the time.”
The idea of using a horror flick to process
the toxic convolutions of divorce makes per-
fect sense when it comes to Baumbach, a die-
hard movie freak who, at fifty, has patiently
built up a body of cinematic work that quali-
fies him as a poet laureate of marital strife. No,
his directing career didn’t begin with 2005’s
The Squid and the Whale (it got going a de-
cade earlier with the slackers-stuck-in-neutral
tropes of 1995’s Kicking & Screaming, after
which Baumbach himself got stuck in neutral
for a spell), but a lot of people think of Squid
as the movie in which a specifically Baumba-
chian view of the world really started to jell.
Squid was a divorce movie; his new one,
Marriage Story, is a divorce movie, too. And
it’s one that hinges on the realization Baum-
bach had back when Invasion of the Body
52 Winter 2020_Esquire
bones: the idea that people might not be what people hash out a divorce for two hours and
they appear to be. For anyone, like me, who sixteen minutes may sound like sipping a
has ever endured a divorce, watching Mar- bowl of lemon-juice soup, especially for any-
riage Story is simultaneously harrowing, one who has experienced it, but it’s a testa-
heartbreaking, and thrilling. Thrilling be- ment to Baumbach’s dexterity as a filmmak-
cause of everything that Baumbach gets right: er that he keeps re-upping your attention
the nauseating parabola swoops of emotion, with deft jolts in tone. Marriage Story is full
the flirtations with bankruptcy, the austerity of surprises.
of a single dad’s apartment, the strained pan- There are musical interludes that somehow
tomime of solo parenting, and the grim the- don’t feel the slightest bit forced. (It turns out
ater of finding yourself legally pitted against that Adam Driver really can sing.) There are
the person with whom you’ve spent years guest stars who confirm all the received wis-
building a home. The mov-
ie reminded me of “Failing
and Flying,” a poem by Jack
Gilbert that touches on a
paradox of divorce—the
way the end of a relation-
ship seems to devour the
beginning. “Everyone for-
gets that Icarus also flew,”
Gilbert writes. “It’s the
same when love comes to
an end.”
Divorce forces you to
think back to the begin-
ning, when you met some-
one and a life together
seemed full of promise,
and to gulp down the bit-
terness of how much has
changed along the way.
with love letters, or lines that sound as
though they’re from love letters, being re-
cited in tandem by a married couple, Scarlett
Johansson’s Nicole and Adam Driver’s Char-
lie. But the context of those epistolary odes
bach comes to reveal the chasm that stretch-
es between Nicole and Charlie. Pretty soon
they’re both sucked into the scream-induc-
ing, I-don’t-even-know-who-you-are fright-
fest of a full-throttle split, and no matter how
and opt for the serenity of conscious uncou-
pling, legal and logistical challenges wind up
turning them into raging beasts. Can they
avoid becoming pod people? If we still hap-
pened to be living in 1978, the poster for dom about the importance of casting. (Laura
Marriage Story would probably say some- Dern and Ray Liotta’s next move should be a
thing like: “They’ll never get through divorce Netflix series about divorce lawyers.) There’s
without each other.” a screaming match terrifying enough to make
all the costumed punch-and-kick ballet of the
There is a dark comradeship among those Marvel universe look like child’s play (which,
of us who have experienced divorce that’s after all, it is). And yet the perspectives of Ni-
akin to the bond between soldiers who ex- cole and Charlie get equal time in the spotlight.
change stories about the agonies of boot “We’re very much with both of them,” Baum-
camp. You’d think it would be more com- bach says. “There’s no side to take. It can still be
fortable to avoid the war stories, whether a love story even if they don’t end up together.”
in conversation or onscreen, but of course So, yeah, Marriage Story amounts to a dra-
it’s a relief to get them out. “That’s what I ma/thriller/slasher/musical/rom-com about
love,” says Johansson, who has been through two people finding a way to love each other
divorce twice. “I love to pick all that stuff through a labyrinth of existential fog, court-