This article contains spoilers for “Marriage Story” and other Noah Baumbach movies.
About 10 minutes into Noah Baumbach’s 2017 film, “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” Danny Meyerowitz sits down at a piano bench next to his daughter, Eliza, on the eve of her departure for college. The two reminisce in song, unearthing a whimsical duet they composed together when Eliza was 9, with lyrics that reference her only-child specialness and the time she fell off the monkey bars.
Then they get to the chorus:
And there’s always you
And there’s always me
And there’s always us
Mommy and Daddy and Genius Girl make three
Daddy (played by Adam Sandler) is still wearing his wedding ring, but Mommy isn’t around anymore. The song has become a heartbreaking artifact of the closeness this family once shared, built around a child (Grace Van Patten) whose evident sensitivity and intelligence her parents nurtured together. Baumbach invites us to fill in a marital history: Perhaps they lost track of each other over the years, which happens when you raise children, or perhaps there was an affair, which certainly happens in Noah Baumbach films. (As far as we learn, it’s the former.)
Yet there’s a competing thought that is equally touching: Everything is going to be O.K. There are no wistful looks and there is no swallowed grief, even though the wound is fresh for Danny, who’s retreating back home at a humiliating age. After all, divorce is a natural state of being for this family. They’re having dinner with Danny’s father (Dustin Hoffman), who’s on his third wife (Emma Thompson), a flaky woman who drinks too much, makes atrocities like undercooked shark soup, and may well be the right person for him.
It’s hard to think about Baumbach’s new film, “Marriage Story,” as fundamentally optimistic, given how thoroughly it devotes itself to the excruciating process of divorce. Yet Baumbach has been telling marriage stories for most of his career — all of them troubled, the majority terminal — and his thinking on divorce has formed a narrative arc of its own. Divorce is still a terrible rupture in his most recent films, but it is also a catalyst for change — a source of surprising new relationships and families, of career opportunities, of lessons to be carried forward.
Viewed this way, the bittersweet denouement of “Marriage Story” feels like the end of a necessary rite of passage, where once-warring exes can consider each other fondly again and look ahead to a new and richer life.
Drawing connections between an artist’s life and work can be a fool’s business, but it’s fair to say that Baumbach knows the contours of divorce quite well: He has said that the split between his parents, a literary novelist and a film critic, informed “The Squid and the Whale,” an ’80s period piece told through the eyes of a Brooklyn teenager who misplaces his resentment. (He even outfitted the set with his parents’ books.) And the broken bicoastal family in “Marriage Story,” including the young son, echoes Baumbach’s own failed marriage to the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, his collaborator on “Margot at the Wedding” and “Greenberg.” (The director has disavowed more specific connections.)
Baumbach’s films take an inventory of all the items that may shift during flight. There’s a core instability to the relationships in his work, heightened by his refusal to buff out the pettiness and casual cruelty. The very first scene in “The Squid and the Whale” is a doubles match in which a father advises his son to hit at his mother’s weak backhand, then later spikes an overhead into her abdomen. The absurd terms of their joint custody, with their two sons (and the cat) alternating homes every night, is a product of that hostility.
The best that could be hoped for, in the earlier films, is to eke out a sliver of self-awareness. In “Squid,” Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) idolizes the wrong parent, parroting the pretentiousness and misogyny of his father (Jeff Daniels) while treating his mother (Laura Linney) like a harlot. It takes his father’s shameless tryst with a student (Anna Paquin) — the object of Walt’s lust, too — to shake him from his presumptions and start to reflect on his own mistakes. But not before making a casualty out of a smart, earnest girlfriend who stuck with him even after he declared the end of “The Metamorphosis” to be “Kafkaesque.”
If anything, the cruelty is heightened in “Margot at the Wedding,” which is about the sibling rivalry between Margot (Nicole Kidman), a narcissistic author who responds to pain by inflicting it, and Pauline (Leigh), whose paralyzing uncertainty makes her an easy target. In the lead-up to Pauline’s doomed marriage, Margot’s husband (John Turturro) shows up just long enough to give insight into why she’s trying to sabotage the wedding. Through Baumbach’s lens, a gorgeous shoreline estate on Long Island is rendered as a barren tear-down, symbolized by a rotting family tree that literally crashes down on the reception tent.
While Baumbach’s characters have never lost their lacerating wit — his obsession with their lowest moments and ugliest conflicts is a longstanding virtue — there has been a softening to his perspective as he’s gotten older and an easing off on that Margot-like instinct to provoke. The thawing is evident in a film like “Mistress America,” which isn’t about marriage per se, but about its potential to forge unexpected bonds, like the new friendship that develops between two young women (Lola Kirke and Greta Gerwig) about to be stepsisters. The collapse of their parents’ relationship raises an awkward question that comes up again with the in-laws in “Marriage Story”: Who are they to each other when that link is broken?
The answer, in a film like “Meyerowitz,” is an ad hoc, ramshackle family that comes to terms with its own chaotic making, as husbands and wives and children come in and out of the picture but never really leave. Baumbach digs into relationships between half-siblings and pays a visit to a second wife, taking stock of connections that wax and wane over time but always carry the possibility of growth and surprise. Baumbach holds out hope that the Meyerowitz sons, like Walt in “The Squid and the Whale,” aren’t doomed to repeat all of their father’s mistakes, even if they struggle to wriggle free from his influence.
So when Laura Dern, as a divorce lawyer pitching herself to Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) in “Marriage Story,” says, “What you’re doing is an act of hope,” it’s more than simply a line to flatter a potential client. Divorce will require Nicole and her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Charlie (Adam Driver), to participate in a legal process that is artificial and estranging by nature, calling on them to make cartoon villains of each other. But the wrongness of that process is distinct from the rightness of its result, which will give Nicole the freedom she craves and perhaps open doors for Charlie that he never considered. The film is exquisitely subtle in making that distinction.
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