Marriage Story

Marriage Story, written and directed by Noah Baumbach, stirs a lot of thoughts for audiences. It gives a realistic depiction of a youngish couple with a child going through divorce. Adam Driver plays the husband Charlie, a rising-star, theater director in New York, and Scarlett Johansson plays his wife Nicole, a talented actress in his plays. Laura Dern plays Nicole’s tough L.A. divorce lawyer. Released by Netflix, the movie is billed as a drama/comedy, but there is no comedy in this film’s sad, realistic portrayal of two decent persons’ drifting apart, with one of them deciding to leave. After the separation, horrendous acrimony slowly builds until a final, emotional blow-up shatters everyone—the couple and the audience.

Whose point of view tells this story? The man’s or the woman’s? Or, was the take-away for a man watching this film different from the take-away for a woman? Having thoroughly experienced the couple’s feelings, I, a woman, left the theater wondering if a man had experienced the characters’ heartbreak differently from me. I felt it must be so, for the film’s point of view lacked clarity.

I called a friend, a male and a millennial psychologist, and indeed his take-away was wholly different from mine. I identified and sympathized with Nicole’s stunted potential in a marriage where she served her rising-star husband, who loved her and their family life, but had no true interest in her “being,” who she was, as his passion and focus were totally on himself and his work and ambition. Everything else was rote for him and done according to the book of what was right and currently “enlightened,” such as how to be a good father, a considerate household partner, and a good, fair, and beloved director to his troupe.

When, as happens in long marriages, Nicole lost interest in sex, Charlie found sex with the stage manager of his company. No, he didn’t love her, he just needed that kind of intimacy and ego-gratification. He is god in his world. But the affair isn’t why Nicole leaves. She leaves because at age 40ish, she realizes she isn’t fulfilling her own life, her own gifts, her own passion, and she will never be able to if she stays with Charlie to serve his life and his success, which includes receiving a MacArthur grant for $600,000 to further advance his talent. Moreover, his new play is going to Broadway. His power and recognition are only going to keep growing while she stays as she is—his dependable wife, his actress in second place, his competent family partner, his solace and safety when home in the nest she provides.

As in all marriages that begin in the mid-twenties, the partners evolve with time and their risk of not evolving together is high. Charlie and Nicole clearly love and care about each other, but the marriage is over for Nicole if she wants to live, if she wants an authentic, fulfilling life. She returns to her mother’s home in L.A. when a pilot TV series offers her a role. She takes their son Henry along. It’s not certain the show will take-off, so the trip is presented as short-term to see what happens. Once there, however, life feels so good to Nicole—her true identity is able to emerge, not only as an actress free from the shadow of her husband’s greatness, but also as a future director herself, which is her dream. Henry also loves living in L.A. with Nicole’s active, extended family life that includes cousins. The only problem is, Charlie’s life is in New York, so that his career and ambition become bombed by Nicole’s decision to remain in L.A. when the pilot succeeds. But it’s not just the pilot that makes her stay. It’s her good feelings about herself, about having a meaningful life, her right just as much as his. In L.A., she’s not Charlie’s appendage anymore, which was fine in her twenties when she worshiped him and came under his wing, but it’s not fine now in her maturity. She has her own developed talent, equal to his when freed from its cage.

My male friend’s take-away was different. He saw Charlie as the victim of Nicole’s manipulations. She left New York knowing her L.A. stint was going to be permanent. She tricked him, and now has the child legally in L.A. causing a custody suit. Her character was shallow while his was deep. Not only that, but Adam Driver was a far better actor than Scarlett Johansson. And Nora, the aggressive L.A. lawyer, was creepy, hideous—he shuddered just remembering her.

I want to pause here and say that Nora, portrayed as L.A.’s toughest, man-gouging divorce lawyer for women, also affected me as a female viewer. She’s groomed pejoratively: slinky, skin-revealing clothes (like a gross sex object), long blond hair incongruous with her aging face, and a fake way of communicating with her new client, all saccharine in order to win her business. Why was Nora presented this way? Perhaps to mock L.A./Hollywood culture when it comes to divorce, for Charlie’s L.A. male lawyer is even worse. These characters are driven by money and how much you can get from your future ex-spouse; no concern for damage done to children and the parents in such an antagonistic, bitter, and volatile tug of war. It’s crass and tragic.

But there’s more to consider. Everything that spouts from Nora’s smart, fighter lips about the double standard is true. Who is listening to her? Perhaps some members of the female audience. I heard her and as a result, overlooked her unappealing traits because she spoke the truth about male-female relationships and how society condones men and condemns women in the same situation. My male friend couldn’t tolerate her, and because of her money-grasping and exterior traits, he felt even more that Nicole was a conniving manipulator and Charlie a victim. Again, the film’s point of view comes up. Was everything Nicole said to Charlie about her deepest feelings and why she was leaving, and Nora’s pronouncements about the double standard, part of the script for the truth they told or part of the script to mock women in favor of Charlie the battered hero?

It would be interesting to set up a poll to compare the male and female responses to this movie—and I welcome hearing from you. The film ends nicely, because Nicole and Charlie are able to go back to their original, honest and caring roots and dump the lawyers in their divorce. And Charlie accepts the reality that Nicole is not coming back and figures out a way to make fruitful changes in his professional life in order to be near his son. But what is the film’s point of view about that, about Charlie making changes to accommodate the divorce? My point of view is: good solution. My friend’s point of view might be: she forced him to wreck his career, give up his New York life and passion. Nora the lawyer might say: This film perpetuates the way society has always viewed women as demons; it upholds the superior integrity and value of men. And the film? We don’t leave the theater knowing the film’s point of view, but my closest guess is: Charlie’s beleaguered treatment deserves our support. Hopefully it’s a wrong guess.

The Cranes Are Flying

Dir. Mikhail Kalatozov (Russia,1957)

December 15, 2019, 3:00 pm, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Cranes Are Flying takes place in Soviet Moscow during World War II, when the Russians declare war on Germany. Shot in black-and-white, in possibly the best cinematography in that medium, the film cries, bleeds, with feeling, most of it portrayed through the central character’s facial expressions. She is young, vivacious, Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova), whose heart skips and soars with love for twenty-five-year-old Boris (Aleksey Batalov), a factory engineer and son of a prominent doctor. Handsome, concert-pianist Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin) also lives with Boris’s family and is in love with Veronica, but she adamantly rejects him in favor of Boris, whom she plans to marry.

The movie opens with the lovers traipsing along the embankment of the Moscow River. They’re as carefree and exuberant as children, for such is the feeling of being in love. Suddenly, Veronica stops and watches a formation of cranes flying overhead. Her face shows total awe and the camera focuses on her feeling. From then on, throughout the movie, life’s deepest feelings are shown through the characters’ faces, especially Veronica’s, for it’s her story. The camera work connects us, the audience, to those same innermost feelings that words can never convey.



Intentionally or not, the cranes in formation have a flip side and portend the coming war and fighter jets on their way to bomb cities and humanity; the miracle of nature juxtaposes the villainy of humanity. The cranes in flight bookend the movie—appearing just before and just after the war. Another bookend also frames the story: Veronica fighting her way through throngs of cheering Muscovites as they send their soldiers off to war, and then, when they greet them home again. In these crowd-scene bookends, Veronica is first trying to find Boris to say farewell, and then, trying to find him among the returning soldiers. When the cranes fly overhead in this last scene, they convey through Veronica’s facial expression the inexplicable coexistence of “wondrous life” and “imperfect humanity,” for she has learned Boris is dead. She has no choice but to carry on after war’s death, destruction, and grief—such is life.

The story is like a fairy tale, a parable, or a morality play. The characters are stock: young lovers, family patriarch, dishonest cousin, judgmental sister, wise grandmother. We don’t need unique personalities or witty dialogues for this story to deliver its breathtaking magic. Nor does its dated morality impinge on its art. What the film delivers in camera work by Sergey Urusevsky attains a peak of visual art, and of course depends somewhat on Samoilova’s talent for expressing her character’s inner states through only physical and facial movements. The camera’s “subjective style” takes us into her unconscious mind’s image-experience of traumatic events, such as her rape by Mark, her panic in the mob, her discovery of her parents’ bombing death, and her final reawakening to hope, humanity, and love. As one Russian critic wrote when the film came out, “You don’t know whether the image of Veronica owes her charm to Samoilova’s talent and sincerity or to Urusevsky’s art, able to catch in the turn of a head, a momentary pose, the blink of eyelashes, the helplessness and obstinacy, the tenderness and pride of this particular woman’s character.”

Urusevsky achieves this same powerful hold on us when Boris, fighting on the swampy front, is hit by a bullet. We die with him, we experience his last, unconscious mind’s images, not his thoughts, before he keels over backward into the sloshing mud. The camera twirls and swirls and collides with images we feel, we relate to, that are beyond verbal communication. On a side note, one marvels at the terrifying risk Samoilova (or her double) takes during the first mob scene when she runs blindly through rolling army tanks looking for Boris as the Soviet forces leave Moscow for the front.



Our values, our way of living, our morality, and our artistic renderings have changed since The Cranes Are Flying was made. We no longer portray new love in an idealized, ultra-sentimental way, even if we actually feel that way when newly in love. Our Western society has become open and conscious of gender and minority equalities. The shame and ostracism placed on Veronica because she marries Mark after he violently rapes and mentally crushes her wouldn’t happen today. The movie’s attitude toward war has also changed. When the German invasion occurs, Boris and his friends automatically rush to sign up: fighting for the homeland is their responsibility. One thing has not changed about the movie: what it achieved in 1957 with its cinematic portrayal of our innermost feelings remains. For film art lovers, Cranes is a must see.