Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver play a couple in crisis in
“Marriage Story”, an emotional tale of a relationship falling apart and a
project the Hollywood actress said she felt was “fated” as it came about as she
went through her own divorce.
The “Avengers” regular and “Star Wars” actor portray actress
Nicole and theatre director Charlie, who go their separate ways when the
former, feeling unfilled, returns to her native Los Angeles with their son to
shoot a television series pilot.
While Charlie at first
believes Nicole and Henry, 8, will eventually return to New York, he soon
realises this will not happen. The couple want an amicable split but it spirals
into something nastier when pushy divorce lawyers are called in.
The Netflix film, directed
and written by Noah Baumbach, has been billed one of the must-sees at the
Venice Film Festival, where the streaming giant won the top Golden Lion Prize
last year for Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma”.
Baumbach, whose last work
“The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)” was also a Netflix film, has spoken
of how he drew from his own personal experience of divorce and that of friends
when writing the movie.
“Something that I discovered
in writing (the film is that) ... when something stops working that you
actually acknowledge it or recognise it for the first time,” Baumbach told a
news conference.
“It’s like if you’re going
through a door and it’s locked you suddenly look at the door and you look at
how it works, so I thought well through a divorce we could explore a marriage.”
Johansson told reporters she
was going through a divorce herself when she first met Baumbach to talk about
the film. The 34-year-old was previously married to actor Ryan Reynolds and
journalist turned art curator Romain Dauriac.
“I hadn’t seen (Baumbach) in
a long time...so I think I just kind of probably blew into the room and you
know just ordered a glass of white wine and started complaining,” she said.
“He was just listening and
attentive, but then he said ‘funny you should be talking about this, probably
either a project you’re really gonna want to do or not want to see or be a part
of I don’t know, we’ll see how you feel about it’, but it was almost...it felt
sort of fated in a way I guess.”
Viewers follow Nicole and
Charlie’s journey to divorce as they try to navigate a new life apart and
across the country, both intent on making sure their son is spared the pain of
his parents separating.
Tensions eventually rise,
climaxing in a huge screaming match, a scene Driver said made him think of “the
theatrics of divorce”.
“You’re kind of performing
... for a judge and there’s mediators,” he said.
“So in working on it, it just
felt more like that, it felt like theatre, we blocked it out, we talked about
where we were going to go, it wasn’t something that we winged.”
The movie already had
murmurings of potential awards success before its Thursday premiere and critics
in Venice were enthusiastic.
The Hollywood Reporter called
it “Baumbach’s best yet” and Variety said it was “better than good; it’s more
than just accomplished”, while IndieWire praised “a pair of devastating
performances from Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson that rank as their very
best”.