divorce

Marriage Story (2019)

André Crous

Marriage Story tells the tale of a divorce, but instead of focusing on the protracted heartache, Noah Baumbach shows how entangled two souls can be, especially when they are struggling to uncouple. Marriage Story

USA
4*

Director:
Noah Baumbach
Screenwriter:
Noah Baumbach
Director of Photography:
Robbie Ryan

Running time: 135 minutes

The devil is in the details, but so is the divine. Two people who have lived together for years, had a child together and worked together suddenly separate to file for divorce, but these details remain embedded in their beings. With every encounter, the two souls are inadvertently drawn back to each other, even as the brains in the two bodies tell them not to. This is the tragic soil of a separation in which the two people who know each other best and can still stand each other try not to be together.

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is not so much an autopsy of a failed marriage as it is a forensic examination of a burgeoning divorce. What is most striking, however, is that things look grim even when the characters have the best intentions. The film opens with an extended montage that is filled with so much love and emotion the viewer may very well burst into tears right at the outset. In voice-over, we hear Charlie (Adam Driver) list all the things he loves about his wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson). Next, Nicole relates to us everything that makes Charlie so special to her. These are all details, many of them mundane, but they are the accumulated moments and qualities that epitomise their loving perception of their partner in sickness and in health, in love, marriage and life. That is, until it all falls apart.

We are quickly disabused of our fanciful notion that the love we see onscreen is enough, as the sequence ends with the couple at a marriage counsellor. But Nicole has made up her mind: She wants to leave Charlie and his theatre company and her job as actress in his plays and their life in New York – all of it – and move back to Los Angeles to star in a television pilot. And she is taking their young son, Henry, with her. A few days later, when Charlie comes to California to visit, he finds out she is intent on staying and has hired a high-powered kale-eating lawyer (Laura Dern at her absolute best) to defend her interests, just in case.

It should come as no surprise that Marriage Story is most affecting when the two main characters try to work through the rubble of their relationship. Filled with words carved from the flesh of its two leads, these moments are particularly poignant when they play out in an intimate setting. In a pivotal scene halfway through, Baumbach puts Charlie and Nicole in an empty room with nothing on the walls and no other characters to distract us, and he forces the couple to empty their souls. It works brilliantly as drama, and the scene is written in such a way that neither of the two characters consistently has the upper hand. We can easily sympathise with either of them. In fact, our sympathies swing back and forth between the two as the scene unfolds and they glimpse more and more of each other’s (and their own) deepest darkest sides.

It all comes down to the details – sometimes hidden, sometimes out in the open – and how they accumulate over time. Nicole’s reason for leaving Charlie does not have the drama we often associate with break-ups. We never even see the moment it happens. It was one final straw that landed on a decade of detail and broke the marriage carriage. It was as simple as her receiving a script for a pilot and him letting out a chuckle at the idea she would swap off-Broadway for Hollywood.

But that is exactly how these long-term relationships fall apart. Not with a bang, but with a fizz that is long in coming. And after holding their emotions in for long enough, the dam break is a sight to behold, especially in the hands of players as accomplished as Scarlett Johansson and, particularly, the large-of-frame but vulnerable-0f-voice Adam Driver.

In an early post-breakup scene at their Brooklyn apartment, Charlie finds his wife speaking to him like a stranger, but when Nicole says good night and turns the corner and the camera lets us see her unguarded, the true emotions are overwhelming. It is a breathtaking revelation that demonstrates how Baumbach puts his characters through their paces while never letting go of them as fully fledged human beings.

Those details of a relationship remain deep down, even when the people involved tell themselves they have moved on. We are reminded of how embedded they are again and again throughout the film, right to the very end. In so doing, Baumbach stitches his characters together even as their relationship irreparably disintegrates, offering a tragic reminder of the past while the present lurches forward, inexorably, towards a future that appears all but inevitable.

Sparrows (2015)

André Crous

Rúnar Rúnarsson’s second feature film provides an emotionally resonant look at a teenage boy’s coming of age on Iceland’s majestic Westfjords peninsula.

sparrowsIceland
4*

Director:
Rúnar Rúnarsson
Screenwriter:
Rúnar Rúnarsson
Director of Photography:
Sophia Olsson

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Þrestir

The first time we see the teenage Ari’s face, he is singing in a 28-boy-strong choir in Reykjavik. The hall in which they are performing is stately and white as snow, and as the rays of sunlight hit his neck, we see what appear to be light tufts of down. This boy is still very much an innocent angel, and although he will mostly remain that way for the duration of the film, the situations he is confronted with become ever more complex as he gradually learns what it is to be a man.

Sparrows (Þrestir), Rúnar Rúnarsson’s second feature film, doesn’t cover the usual bases of a coming-of-age story. Yes, in this case, there is a divorce, an absent father, his first sexual encounter and so forth, but Rúnarsson’s perceptive eye for teenage politics in general and the loneliness of an outsider in particular, as well as frequent dips into melancholia that wash over the pale, almost inexpressive face of the main character, make this a wonderful glimpse of one boy’s life in the wilderness.

Said wilderness is Iceland’s Westfjords, the country’s large peninsula to the northwest, where cliffs rise up sharply out of the ocean and appear to be much more imposing than their actual height would lead one to believe. The town where almost all of the action is set is the hamlet of Flateyri, although shots of nearby Bolungarvík also make up the fictional town here. Everyone here knows each other, but this familiarity is worlds removed from Ari’s former life in the capital with his mother, who has now upped and moved to Africa with her Danish husband.

In spite of the talk of hunting, the fighting and the sex, it ultimately becomes clear to Ari that being a man does not mean being macho. Being a man does not even mean one has to be responsible. However, it does entail dealing honestly with one’s own shortcomings, and that is why the film’s final image – an intimate hug between two men – is ultimately so incredibly powerful. On three occasions, the ethereal sounds of a piece of music by Kjartan Sveinsson lift Sparrows into the realm of the transcendental, flawlessly complementing the religious songs that Ari sings on multiple occasions, including, most strikingly, all alone inside a giant water tower. His solos bring almost heartbreaking calm to the turmoil that we know he is experiencing on the inside.

The film has countless small moments that are not highlighted but stand firm as milestones that line Ari’s journey towards maturity. While there will be a great deal of focus on a particularly traumatic scene late in the plot that will have the viewer’s stomach churning with empathy, other smaller incidents are equally important. Ari’s father, Gunnar, who has drowned his sorrows in alcohol since divorcing Ari’s mother, is ill-equipped to take care of his teenage son on the cusp of adulthood but out of sorts in this new landscape. Every moment that Ari considers unique is somehow spoiled by his father who has a similar moment with other characters, from having sex with the same woman to sharing a jacuzzi and even the house with too many other people.

Throughout the film, the towering cliffs – their feet often shrouded in mist – are ever-present, seemingly about to overwhelm the insignificant figures in the foreground. In fact, our very first impression of the area is a shot of the tiny airplane flying almost too close along the fjord walls before landing at the airport in Ísafjörður. This image is followed almost immediately by a shot of Ari waiting for his father, as he has done for much of his life, at the arrivals gate.

While main actor Atli Óskar Fjalarsson is very good, the only letdown is the scenes when he is supposed to express violent rage, which unfortunately comes across as somewhat contrived. This issue is perhaps understandable given that these moments turn very sharply away from the general trajectory of the plot and the overall restrained behaviour of the character. The quieter scenes, of which there are many, are much more convincing and more effective at drawing the viewer in close to Ari.

Sparrows are never seen nor spoken of, but the title most probably refers to the small birds because of their biblical meaning of being among the smallest and least valuable of animals while nonetheless still cared for and watched over by God. While this explanation is informative, it is unclear why the title takes the plural form.