The director’s breakthrough film was about his parents’ divorce, and his latest movie seems to be about his own. But what he thinks they are really about is hope
Over the years, Noah Baumbach, the
American writer/director, has made films about all sorts of things. Kicking and Screaming (1995) is about a group of college pals who refuse to move on with their lives. While We’re Young (2014) is about a friendship between a middle-aged documentary-maker and his wife, and a couple in their 20s. The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) is about siblings attempting to live in the shadow of their egomaniacal artist father. But for some of us, he really has only one true subject: D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Consider the best movies of his career so far, made almost 15 years apart: The Squid and the Whale (2005), the bittersweet picture that first brought him to most people’s attention, is about divorce, and so, too, is Marriage Story, his hotly Oscar-tipped new film. To pinch from Philip Larkin, separation is to Baumbach what daffodils were to Wordsworth.
Not that he sees it quite like this. When we meet in a clattering
New York restaurant on a cold, bright autumn morning, Baumbach is annoyingly keen to resist my passionately held theory that people whose parents split up when they were children (him, me) grow up to be somewhat preoccupied by divorce, a fascination that will probably end (at least in my case) only with death. “Yes, both those films are about divorce,” he says, in his careful, rather ponderous way. “The Squid and the Whale from the kids’ perspective, and Marriage Story from that of the adults. But what they also provide narratively is the opportunity to talk about other things.” I stare at him. What other things? What can he possibly mean?