Noah Baumbach’s film about divorce, starring Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, is unique: it is simultaneously sad and funny, mean and hilarious
‘I knew the moment my marriage ended that someday it might make a book – if I could just stop crying about it. One of the things I’m proudest of is that I managed to convert an event that seemed to me hideously tragic at the time to a
comedy – and if that’s not fiction I don’t know what is.”
This is what Nora Ephron wrote on the 25th anniversary of the publication of her classic novel, Heartburn, which was inspired by her divorce from the journalist Carl Bernstein. It’s a quote that Noah Baumbach would be more than entitled to slap on at the beginning of Marriage Story, a film that was inspired by his divorce from actor Jennifer Jason Leigh. For some reason, people (fools) keep comparing Baumbach’s movie to Kramer vs Kramer, the 1979 anti-feminist divorce movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. But Kramer vs Kramer just converts its rage and sadness into more rage and more sadness. In Heartburn, Ephron alchemised her anger and grief into something extremely funny, honest and vulnerable. Baumbach does the same with Marriage Story, which tells the story of the collapse of Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole’s (Scarlett Johansson) marriage. But Baumbach goes one step further, something you almost never see in any movie, let alone one about divorce: he looks at both the man and the woman’s experiences. (In fact, the only movie I can think of that is equally interested in its male and female protagonists is When Harry Met Sally, which was written by … Nora Ephron.)