new york times movie review marriage story

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• Noah Baumbach’s <i>Marriage Story</i> Understands That No One Outside a Marriage Can Know the Truth of It

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story Understands That No One Outside a Marriage Can Know the Truth of It

I n the days when movie stars used to appear in mainstream melodramas made for grownups—when we used to have mainstream melodramas made for grownups—it meant something to watch suffering play out on a deeply familiar face. Joan Crawford, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, William Holden: With their charisma and their carriage, in their Hollywood-royalty clothes, these people were spectacular and special creatures—surely, they couldn’t be as susceptible to emotional torment as we mere mortals are. But then, as you watched them in character, you’d see their hearts breaking or their spirits being crushed, and the sting was acute. They reminded you that no one is too beautiful to feel pain.

That’s the effect of watching Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, two of our own most appealing modern movie stars, in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s canny and cutting Marriage Story, a Netflix release playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival. Johansson and Driver play Nicole and Charlie, the two halves of a disintegrating couple: He’s a smart, modestly successful theater director about to debut his first show on Broadway. She’s his star actor, enormously gifted but overshadowed by her husband’s ambition and outsized confidence, both of which shine right through his aw-shucks demeanor. Nicole and Charlie have a son together, Henry (Azhy Robertson), whom they clearly adore. But things have gone jaggedly wrong between them. Nicole is about to leave the family’s home in New York for Los Angeles, where she’ll be filming a TV pilot—it’s a big deal for her, a chance to break off a little piece of fame for herself, though she senses Charlie looks down on the project. (He kind of does.) She’ll be taking Henry with her, and although the understanding is that the two will return to New York after her work is done, the act of dissolving the marriage is already in progress.

Nicole and Charlie have made it clear to each other and to everyone else that their split is going to be friendly and breezy, with minimal impact on Henry. But once Nicole reaches Los Angeles, the proceedings escalate. She connects with an almost diabolically shrewd divorce lawyer, Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern, in a performance as cleanly chiseled as her collarbones), who reassures her that this split can be everything that she desires—but that she should also get as much as she can, moneywise and custody-wise, out of the deal.

Charlie doesn’t know what hit him; actually, it takes forever for him to realize that anything has hit him at all. He attempts to hire an expensive shark of a lawyer (a disarmingly intense Ray Liotta), only to back off in favor of a sweetpea old-timer (Alan Alda, characteristically affable) who’s more in tune with his own trusting nature. Before long, Charlie and Nicole are barely speaking, and Nora, speaking in savvy lawyerese cloaked in the soothing tones of a self-help guru, is calling the shots. The savagery seems one-sided at first, driven mostly by Nicole’s desire to stay in Los Angeles and keep her son with her—you wonder when Charlie is going to stop walking around with that invisible “Kick me!” sign taped to his back. There’s a way in which Baumbach seems to want to tip the scales of sympathy toward the guy in the story—Nicole’s behavior sometimes comes off as a little too ruthless.

But Charlie finally gets the full picture, and realizes that no matter what, he wants his son to know he fought for him. And if Baumbach has, until this point, only signaled that these two characters will inflict great damage and pain upon one another, this is where he really opens the door to the sufferdome. Driver’s features are rubbery, agile, insanely likable—he’s got the kind of nose babies love to grab. To see Charlie close down—to see his face as swollen as a thundercloud with anguish and anger—is to see a movie star channel the very things we’ve all, at one time or another, struggled to banish or at least suppress. Driver ferries Baumbauch’s super-cerebral script—Baumbach could never not be cerebral —to a place beyond thinking, where raw emotion becomes an entropic, hurricane swirl.

Johansson’s mode is different but no less affecting. Her face is as expressive as Driver’s, but she sends feeling out in packets of light—one minute she bathes you in a pale, warm nightlight glow, a reassurance that all is right with the world; the next might be a power-surge flash, as if some unseen, wrathful goddess were sending lightning bolts to Earth through her fingertips. But mostly, Nicole guards her feelings more closely than Charlie does, and her subterranean vulnerability is like a heartbeat you can see. Baumbach is working with an ace cinematographer here, Robbie Ryan, who opens up a great deal of air around Johansson—uncrowded, she’s free to move and breathe, putting every emotional color on display.

Nicole and Charlie spar and claw at each other, drawing figurative blood if not the real kind. (At one point, Charlie semi-inadvertently slices into one of his own veins.) Their mutual antagonism is wrenching to watch because they, and Baumbach, have already shown us what things were like in better times. The movie’s opening is a catalog of the types of things that, in the best circumstances, can keep people bonded for life. Before seeing a marriage arbitrator, Charlie and Nicole have been asked to draw up a list of things that each loves about the other, and we hear these lists read in the character’s voices. “He’s very clear about what he wants, unlike me, who can’t always tell,” Nicole says of Charlie. Charlie praises Nicole’s generosity, her ability to feel everything so deeply. “She cuts all our hair,” he adds, and in an accompanying flashback we see her in action, going to work with the scissors as wisps of her loved ones’ hair fall to the floor. The image is so casual and quotidian that it nearly destroys you. This is what a marriage looks like when it works. But you can never adequately capture what destroys a marriage, because that unpredictable beast is the most camera-shy of gremlins.

When Marriage Story was announced, beard-strokers everywhere—even those with no literal beards to stroke—mused that this movie must surely be drawn from Baumbach’s experience splitting with his former wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, with whom he has a child. Of course! Probably. Why not? Baumbach has already made one autobiographical work, in 2005, with The Squid and the Whale , drawn from his experience of his parents’ divorce when he was a child ; it’s hardly unthinkable that he might make another. But if Baumbach has embedded any deeply personal elements in Marriage Story, they feel more like open secrets than confessional revelations. I suspect almost anyone who has dissolved a seemingly perfect union can relate to at least some of Marriage Story, especially if there are children involved. As a filmmaker, Baumbach’s smartest move here is that he never explains exactly how or what went wrong between these two, people whose sine waves seem as in sync as a pair of dolphins swimming in the sea. No one outside a marriage can know the truth of it; that’s a secret meant only for those inside. If you think you can squeeze a camera in there, you’re an endoscopic surgeon, not a filmmaker—and Baumbach would be the first to tell you he’s just the latter.

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End Times in “Terminator: Dark Fate” and “Marriage Story”

By Anthony Lane

Of the many charms of the “Terminator” franchise, the most delightful is the emergence of a new etiquette. Once Homo sapiens and Homo roboticus begin to interact, and once time ceases to be something that you waste or spend and becomes a portal through which you pass, the language of social custom shifts accordingly. Thus, in the latest installment, “Terminator: Dark Fate,” one character says to another, “When are you from?” Better still, because it’s uttered by Arnold Schwarzenegger , is the exquisite line “May I ask what you are?”

The director is Tim Miller, though the name that shines out from the credits is that of James Cameron , who is listed as a producer and as one of five contributors to the story. The first two “Terminator” films, in 1984 and 1991, were directed by Cameron alone, and, after his departure, the ensuing movies—“Terminator: Rise of the Machines” (2003), “Terminator Salvation” (2009), and “Terminator Genisys” (2015)—are widely held to have suffered a process of gradual decay, like unrefrigerated fish. Much is expected, then, from the return of the king.

The action starts with a grainy clip of a scene from “ Terminator 2: Judgment Day ,” in which the heroine, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), ranted about a looming apocalypse. Thanks to her intervention, it was averted, but we now learn of a reloom—a second-generation disaster, in which cyborgs spawned by an A.I. program called Legion will get seriously futuristic on the world’s ass. The good news is that Sarah’s back, and hellbent, once again, on stopping the horror before it happens. What she’s been doing in the interim is unclear, though my guess is that she’s been rehearsing her heavy-weapons drill and, to judge by her voice, smoking forty Camels a day.

The plot consists of heated-up leftovers from the first three “Terminator” films. An unrelenting android, Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna), is dispatched from the years to come and lands in the present day, his duty being to destroy a young Mexican woman, Dani (Natalia Reyes), for reasons as yet unrevealed. Against him are arrayed the following: Sarah, who brings along a rocket launcher as you or I would pack an energy drink; Grace (Mackenzie Davis), who is like any other human, only more so, having been “augmented,” as she says, with superior powers; and a grizzled old geezer named Carl (Schwarzenegger), who lives near Laredo, Texas, with his family and runs a business making drapes. When you hear how decisive Carl can be with his customers—“The guy wanted solid-color blocks for his little girl’s bedroom, and I said, ‘ Don’t do it ’ ”—you wonder vaguely what he did before.

Schwarzenegger is oddly touching and funny here, but don’t take my word for it. Take his. “I’m reliable, I’m a very good listener, and I’m extremely funny,” he says, with a face of steel. Having been a killer in the first film and a protector in the second, he is now steered into a wholly novel groove. I don’t buy those changes for a moment, though I applaud the effort, whereas poor Rev-9 is, if anything, a downgrade from T-1000, the villain in “Judgment Day.” Both can assume any guise and, when smashed or shredded, mold themselves back into shape; the difference is that, whereas the earlier model was like quicksilver, the new one appears to be made of molasses. If you attacked him with self-rising flour, two eggs, and a handful of raisins, you could turn him into a fruitcake.

Despite the déjà vu, there is plenty to savor in Miller’s film, and the final third, in particular, is quite the light show. Any fool can, say, jump from a Lockheed C-5. To be inside a Humvee, however, as it drops out of a flaming C-5 whose rear end has been sheared off, and to have your chute deposit you on the lip of a hydroelectric dam, gives you so much more to talk about at parties. As Sarah, Dani, and Grace join forces to trounce their sticky foe, you realize that this is what used to be known as a woman’s picture, propelled by female sacrifice and pluck, and that Mackenzie Davis—tough but not invincible, and wise to her own frailties—is at the core of the propulsion. Meanwhile, for anyone still clinging doggedly to the primacy of the male warrior, the most pressing question is “Will it be curtains for Carl?” Wait and see.

Going to the movies on a date, especially a first date, is a risky business, and many a tender romance must have foundered, in the late nineteen-seventies, during showings of “I Spit on Your Grave.” Never before, though, have I seen anything as openly destructive as “Marriage Story,” the new film from Noah Baumbach , which ought to come with a warning from the M.P.A.A.: “Contains scenes that may wreck your relationship.”

Charlie ( Adam Driver ), a theatre director, lives in New York with his wife, Nicole ( Scarlett Johansson ), an actress, and their eight-year-old son, Henry (Azhy Robertson). We start with two declarations of love. Nicole tells us what she loves about her husband, and he returns the compliment. Each praises the other’s warmth as a parent, plus a variety of respective quirks—Charlie’s tidiness, or Nicole’s knack for opening jars. Notice, by the way, that both parties are described as “competitive.” For a second, we glimpse what lurks ahead.

Baumbach is toying with us. Those declarations, it transpires, are part of a mediation session, which goes badly; the marriage is melting. Nicole flies to Los Angeles to film a pilot for a TV show, taking Henry with her. They stay with Nicole’s exuberant mother (Julie Hagerty). Also around is Nicole’s sister, Cassie (Merritt Wever), who pulls off the funniest and most flustered sequence in the movie—serving Charlie with divorce papers when he arrives. Not funny at all, for him.

That blend of tones, with near-farce and emotional brutality blitzed together, is pure Baumbach, and he dishes it up for two hours straight. Not that his comedy is black. Rather, the damage to hearts and minds is somehow inflicted with a terrible buoyancy of spirit, and at an unbearable cost—literally so in the case of Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), the top-rate lawyer who represents Nicole in the split. “Sorry I look so schleppy,” she says, sashaying across her office in lofty scarlet heels, curling up beside Nicole, and offering tea and cookies (“I’ll send you home with some”). Dern is in devilish form, right down to the little moue of sympathy that she gives when Nicole says, “I don’t want any money or anything.” Yeah, sure.

In the opposite corner is Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta), a bruiser in a suit the color of rain clouds, whose basic retainer is twenty-five thousand dollars. Initially, Charlie goes for the cheaper option, employing Bert Spitz (Alan Alda), who operates out of a crummy joint with a microwave and a cat, and who seems, at least, to register the vandalizing of human dignity on which his trade relies. When the fight gets dirty, however, Bert isn’t up to scratch. “I needed my own asshole,” Charlie says, switching his allegiance to Jay.

Something should be pointed out here, something that you hardly realize as you revel in the expertise of “Marriage Story,” and in the gutsy panache of the performers. It may be something of which the movie is itself unconscious, so steeped is its creator in the world that he describes. This is a frighteningly first-world piece of work. Viewers in countries whose litigious instincts are less barbaric may watch it in amazement, as if it were science fiction. We laugh at Jay’s astronomical fee, but the real joke is that Charlie pays it—that he can afford to pay it—when it comes to the crunch. How about the vast majority of husbands and wives, especially wives, who cannot abide the misery of their union but lack the funds to either solve or dissolve it? The crunch will slay them. In court, it’s true, a judge refers in passing to people with fewer resources than Charlie and Nicole; but one line barely leaves a dent.

Now and then, Baumbach tips his hat to Bergman. “Scenes from a Marriage” is the headline on a magazine article about Charlie and Nicole, and she even plays Electra onstage, as Liv Ullmann’s character does in “ Persona ” (1966). To be honest, though, we are leagues away from Bergman, and “Marriage Story” belongs more to the long and hissy saga of antagonism between Los Angeles and New York. Nicole’s Off Broadway endeavors are dismissed in California as “downtown shit,” and Charlie protests, with ardor, that “we’re a New York family, that’s just a fact.” Hence the devastating shot of him alone on Halloween in L.A., dressed as the Invisible Man, with a bandaged head, and gazing forlornly at the TV. Late-capitalist anomie in a nutshell.

And yet, to be fair, both players are given their say, and their clamorous voice, in equal measure. Johansson unfurls a long and demanding soliloquy, persuading us that Nicole’s role in Charlie’s existence had dwindled to “feeding his aliveness.” Driver, inflating his lungs, responds with a glowing rendition of “Being Alive,” from Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” which sends you reeling and should—but does not—bring the movie to a close. So, which half of the couple is in the right? Neither of them. And both. And who is more alive? It’s a tie. ♦

An earlier version of this piece misstated dialogue said to the Nicole character.

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By Richard Brody

By Ian Parker

By Michael Schulman

Review: Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson will break your heart in the masterful ‘Marriage Story’

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Charlie Barber (Adam Driver) is a director. Nicole Barber (Scarlett Johansson) is an actress. For years they have worked together at the same avant-garde theater company, and for years they have also been husband and wife, with a son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), who is now 8. At home one night in their Brooklyn apartment, Charlie offers Nicole a note on her latest performance, a longtime habit that seems particularly superfluous since she is about to exit the show and their marriage. But he offers it anyway: “At the end, I could tell you were pushing for the emotion.”

Like almost everything else in “Marriage Story,” Noah Baumbach’s scalding, wrenching and inexhaustibly rich new movie, the line serves more than one purpose. It’s a power move, a chance for Charlie to take Nicole down a peg in the guise of feedback. It’s also an honest insight between creative professionals who have built their life together around their art. It’s the movie’s challenge to itself, a promise that Driver and Johansson, both in peak form, will experience none of the same strain. There will be no pushing for the emotion here.

Most of all, it offers a crucial clue as to what “Marriage Story” is about. Of course it’s about the end of a relationship, and Baumbach, a peerless observer of domestic pettiness and passive-aggressive behavior, puts every unflattering detail under his dramatic microscope. His combination of rigor and empathy has already earned any number of critical superlatives, and I’m not here to dispute any of them. “Marriage Story” is an emotionally lacerating experience, a nearly flawless elegy for a beautifully flawed couple, a broken-family classic to set beside “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Fanny and Alexander,” to name two films that Baumbach references visually here.

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But it is also something else: not just one of the best-acted movies you’ll see this year but also one of the year’s best movies about acting. This should come as little surprise. From “Margot at the Wedding” to “The Meyerowitz Stories,” Baumbach has long been interested in the lives of privileged, cultured individuals with a tendency to self-dramatize. And if every marriage requires an element of pretense, then divorce may demand an all-out charade, especially if both parties are committed to the appearance of a smooth, amicable uncoupling.

Their initial script is one they have written, at a mediator’s instruction, in the form of personal letters memorializing their relationship. We hear them read those letters in voice-over, accompanied by flashbacks to happier times with Henry and set to a lovely, plaintive score by Randy Newman. There are home-cooked meals and games of Monopoly, afternoon outings and bedtime rituals. Charlie speaks affectionately of Nicole’s kindness and klutziness, and of her gifts as an actress. Nicole talks about what a good dad Charlie is, how much she admires his self-sufficiency and initiative. It’s clear that these two know each other inside out.

The actors seem to know them just as intimately. Nicole may seem the more recessive figure at first, but in Johansson’s tremulous but forceful performance, her easygoing vibe can harden suddenly into steel. Charlie is louder and brasher but also more guileless, and Driver uses his towering Franken-physique to suggest both a figure of authority and an overgrown child. The difficulties facing both actors are considerable — expository monologues shot in demanding long takes, conversations that take them across an entire spectrum of contradictory emotions — but they don’t rise to each challenge so much as absorb it. Together they turn Baumbach’s acerbic words and their own instinctive gestures into the language of a recognizably real relationship.

That relationship, rosy as it may look in retrospect, carries a history of unspoken resentments and uneven compromises. The Barbers’ separation comes at a moment of great professional opportunity for both of them: Charlie’s play, a striking modern update of Sophocles’ “Electra,” is Broadway-bound, while Nicole has landed the lead role in a TV pilot in Los Angeles, where she grew up. She and Henry relocate to L.A. for a spell that Charlie assumes will be temporary, though it becomes clear that his assumptions — plus a spot of workplace infidelity — are what motivated Nicole to begin divorce proceedings in the first place.

The acting metaphor becomes explicit when Charlie flies out to meet Nicole in L.A., and she enlists the help of her mother, Sandra (Julie Hagerty), and sister, Cassie (Merritt Wever), to greet him with divorce papers. Both Sandra and Cassie are actresses too, and the ensuing comedy of errors plays like a piece of experimental theater, or perhaps an awkward improv comedy routine. No one is more thrown off-guard than Charlie: Who changed the script without his permission? Didn’t they agree to do this without lawyers?

Maybe they did — or maybe, as suggested by Nicole’s formidable attorney, Nora (a splendid, take-no-prisoners Laura Dern), Charlie always expects everything to be on his terms. Left scrambling to find L.A. counsel even as work pressures mount in New York, Charlie must choose between Jay (Ray Liotta), a high-priced barracuda who rivals Nora in ruthlessness, and the kinder, more affordable Bert (Alan Alda, wonderful), who approaches the case with welcome warmth but little optimism. There’s no real victory in a $50-billion-per-year divorce industry that incentivizes its customers to behave as unreasonably as possible, even as it bleeds them dry emotionally and financially.

The lawyering up on both sides expands this tense domestic drama into a furiously barbed ensemble comedy in which everyone must play their part to perfection. Nora and Jay know that their job is not just to litigate but to perform, to bring some histrionics to the joint autopsy they’re conducting on the Barbers’ marriage. Charlie and Nicole are performing, too, rehearsing their testimonies and exaggerating each other’s worst qualities to elicit the most favorable outcome.

To a degree that is thrilling as well as depressing, Baumbach shows us how the bitterest divorces don’t just end a marriage but poison its very spirit. Innocuous comments are entered into evidence. Forgivable foibles are weaponized. Los Angeles and New York are dragged into the debate, twin cultural capitals that pit Nicole’s lifestyle ideal against Charlie’s. All this unfolds against a perfectly realized backdrop of chilly boardrooms, drab offices and an L.A. apartment that Charlie races to turn into a presentable home for himself and Henry. (The exquisitely unshowy cinematography and production design are by Robbie Ryan and Jade Healy, respectively.)

Speaking of Henry, a sweet, likable, ordinary kid caught up in a bitterly protracted custody battle, he becomes a prize and an inconvenience, a weight and an abstraction, something his parents end up fighting over more for their benefit than his. There’s an especially cruel irony here: Relentlessly playing the good parents — literally, when an evaluator (Martha Kelly) comes to observe Charlie with Henry — drains them of the time and energy they need to be the good parents they’ve always been.

This is hardly the first time Baumbach, now 50, has steered us through the emotional wreckage of a broken marriage, as he did 14 years ago in “The Squid and the Whale.” That picture was sharply drawn from elements of his parents’ divorce, and “Marriage Story,” though not explicitly autobiographical, has already provoked comparisons with Baumbach’s own.

You may well watch this movie hunting for clues and confessionals, or at least trying to gauge its sympathies. Do they lie with Nicole, who seems to have sacrificed and suffered more during the marriage? Or with Charlie, who has far less family support and seems far likelier to be the director’s onscreen surrogate?

Perhaps the surest sign of Baumbach’s integrity is that he refuses to provide an easy answer. His writing has rarely been more incisive, and it has almost certainly never been more generous or forgiving. Nicole’s aggressive legal strategy may strike you as too calculating by half, unless you understand it to be a long-overdue act of reclamation by a woman tired of putting her own needs and dreams aside. Driver’s performance does achieve the deeper, more lingering impact, in part because Charlie is granted the courtesy of more screen time, but that may well be because he has the most learning and growing to do.

And learn and grow he does. Toward the end of “Marriage Story,” Nicole and Charlie both sing numbers from “Company,” Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical about marriage and its discontents. These are lovely moments, richly textured snapshots of two people who have always been steeped in the arts. But when Charlie launches into his solo (“Someone to hold me too close/Someone to hurt me too deep”), you’re seeing something close to sublime: a man who has managed to embrace his pain and feel more alive, even hopeful, for it. For one shimmering moment, giving a performance and telling the truth suddenly become one, never to be put asunder.

‘Marriage Story’

Rating: R, for language throughout and sexual references Running time: 2 hours, 16 minutes Playing: Opens Nov. 6 at Vista Theatre, Los Angeles, and the Landmark, West Los Angeles; starts streaming Dec. 6 on Netflix

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‘Marriage Story’ Review: Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson Power Emotional Noah Baumbach Drama

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“ Marriage Story ” brings a lot of baggage to the table: It’s a divorce saga about a wealthy showbiz couple that burrows into the emotional turmoil of their split, and the plight of whiny, privileged white people is not exactly in vogue. But the power of “Marriage Story” stems from the way it transcends the simplicity of its premise, with writer-director Noah Baumbach matching the material for his most personal movie with filmmaking ambition to spare, and a pair of devastating performances from Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson that rank as their very best. It starts from a familiar place, then sneaks into transcendence.

The opener packs a wallop. Acclaimed New York playwright Charlie (Driver) and his longtime actress muse Nicole (Johansson) have already decided to part ways, leaving the future custody of their child in doubt. A counselor assigned to mediate the separation asks the pair to jot down each other’s positive attributes, yielding an operatic sequence of dueling voiceovers that careens from Charlie’s affections for Nicole to Nicole’s affections for Charlie before crescendoing in the midst of their current frustrations. It’s an audacious start that epitomizes the contradictory experiences at the center of the movie, a touching evocation of romance with a cynical aftertaste, and Baumbach’s only getting started.

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The irony of “Marriage Story” is that the story has more to do with the particulars of the divorce process — the way the intricate legalities unfold in bland meeting rooms and harsh courtroom exchanges at odds with the fragile circumstances. Over the course of 136 absorbing minutes, as the movie navigates Charlie and Nicole’s clashing perspectives, Baumbach doesn’t attempt to reconstruct the path toward divorce so much as the complex psychological turmoil it instigates for his protagonists.

“Marriage Story” starts with Nicole’s perspective, and the split seems like a no-brainer: Living in Los Angeles as she prepares for a new television show, she has drifted apart from Charlie as he prepares to stage a new project in New York. Nicole was once the shining star of Charlie’s New York-based theater company, but has since moved in her own direction, and he remains oblivious to her needs. At the insistence of a colleague, she connects with the high-powered attorney Nora (a mesmerizing Laura Dern, wearing a smile that could kill). Nora’s the sort of no-nonsense Hollywood veteran whose ability to assess Nicole’s situation requires her to oscillate from benevolent therapist to ruthless interrogator. Nicole’s first session is marked by a freewheeling monologue that stretches on for several minutes, as the actress chronicles the evolution of her attraction to Charlie and its eventual dissolution; there’s enough detail to fill an entire movie of its own, and by the end of the scene, you feel like you’ve seen it without a single flashback.

A jittery comic suspense operates under the surface of many darker moments, from the delivery of divorce papers to an awkward encounter with child protective services. Whereas Nicole’s struggles are tinged with mounting sense of empowerment, Charlie stumbles through a Kafkaesque maze of legalese and the various outsized characters who live in its convoluted pathways. Not since David Fincher’s “Zodiac” has a movie placed such absorbing emphasis on the jigsaw puzzle of searching for solutions that may never fully resolve themselves.

When Charlie pays his own visit to the attorney’s office, he finds himself cowering under the barking demands of another hotshot lawyer to the stars (Ray Liotta, who seems to have stumbled into the frame from “Goodfellas”); his harsh demands are comically undercut by the cheaper option Charlie seeks for a second opinion (Alan Alda), a frumpy negotiator who basically tells Charlie he may as well give up. Alda’s real-life Parkinson’s tremors fuel what may be his saddest performance, and provide a shrewd allegory for the withering sense of defeat that bubbles up in Charlie’s consciousness as he comes to terms with the end of his marriage.

The specter of “Kramer vs. Kramer” casts a mighty shadow on these proceedings, but “Marriage Story” has an intimacy all to its own, and develops a unique tone that even Baumbach fans may not fully recognize at first. Nearly 15 years ago, with “The Squid and the Whale,” Baumbach explored the experience of divorce through the lens of teen angst; with “Marriage Story,” the gaze is more distinctly adult (and funneled to some extent through the end of his own marriage to Jennifer Jason Leigh).   At the same time, the earnest celebration of family that emerged in his “The Meyerowitz Stories” finds a steadier foundation here, as Charlie and Nicole grapple with their dueling priorities and what they mean for their child’s future.

That child is played with remarkable curiosity and innocence by Ashy Robertson, but ultimately becomes more of a prop who animates the couple’s argument that lies at the movie’s center: Charlie insists that the family reside in New York, even though the couple moved to Los Angeles for a prolonged period of time for Nicole’s work, and their child attends school there. Small details about their domestic life resurface as evidence in unnerving courtroom confrontations, leading the couple to wonder if they’re better off just talking things through.

But as they do, the repression of the legal procedure caves into raw explosions of rage. When Charlie finally loses his cool, Driver unleashes a kind of brutal intensity that might even jangle Kylo Ren’s nerves. At the same time, he’s able to channel the character’s passive-aggression into gentler tones. His rendition of “Being Alive” from “Company” at a dinner party is a mesmerizing achievement all by itself. Johansson, meanwhile, has become such a familiar onscreen presence after more than two decades that her talent is often hiding in plain sight. Her ability to carry some of the movie’s more frustrating showdowns illustrate her capacity to look stern and fragile at once.

While Baumbach always excels at crafting tense exchanges between prickly characters unable to come to grips with their true feelings, “Marriage Story” reflects a new level of narrative sophistication. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan (“The Favourite”) captures some of the movie’s most absorbing moments in candid closeups while also knowing when to pull back, including one unexpectedly freaky sequence involving a kitchen knife. Meanwhile, Randy Newman’s inquisitive score highlights some of the bigger moments — as if the actor and director at the center of the story are imagining their dramas in true movie language, and can hear the music on the soundtrack along with us.

To that end, “Marriage Story” functions on a commentary on the type of genre it inhabits: that well-trod terrain of urban sophisticates careening through romantic dissatisfaction as they confront a new phase of life. Baumbach, however, finds a fresh angle by illustrating what it means to live inside that cycle rather than regarding it from afar. (“She makes me feel comfortable about even embarrassing things,” Charlie says when expressing his appreciation for Nicole, and the movie seems to do the same thing for its audience, easing us into their turmoil.) “Marriage Story” is less about divorce than it is about surviving it — a powerful reminder that every breakup story looks familiar until it happens to you, and then the truth hurts.

“Marriage Story” premiered at the 2019 Venice Film Festival and is screening at other fall festivals. It is available on Netflix and in theaters this fall.

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Marriage Story First Reviews: Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver Shine in Noah Baumbach's Best Film Yet

Critics say the film is packed with great dialogue, surprising humor, and nuanced performances, and it's reminiscent of everything from kramer vs. kramer to jurassic park . yes, jurassic park ..

The latest from auteur filmmaker Noah Baumbach , his second for Netflix, premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday to a combination of discomfort and laughter. Marriage Story is a tale of divorce starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson that’s clearly semi-autobiographical, and to the majority of critics in attendance, it’s also a personal triumph for the director. This is likely to be an awards contender for at least members of the ensemble cast, and maybe the screenplay. Still, if you’re not a fan of Baumbach, this might not change your mind.

Here’s what critics are saying about Marriage Story :

How does it compare to Baumbach’s other work ?

Arguably Baumbach’s opus, his best film to date. –  Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

[It’s] easily the wisest film of his career, one that’s only sharpening. –  Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

It is Baumbach’s funniest, most fine-grained picture since 2012’s Frances Ha . –  Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

With Marriage Story , Baumbach cements his reputation as one of this generation’s leading humanist filmmakers. –  Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

This is the work of a filmmaker in full command of his powers. –  Jon Frosch, Hollywood Reporter

Marriage Story is the Noah Baumbach movie we’ve been waiting for. It’s better than good; it’s more than just accomplished… this, at long last, is Baumbach’s breakthrough into the dramatic stratosphere. –  Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Will his fans like it ?

[It] develops a unique tone that even Baumbach fans may not fully recognize at first… Marriage Story reflects a new level of narrative sophistication. –  Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Yes, this is another movie about the misadventures of relatively wealthy, straight white people. That may, understandably, put some people off. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Those who find themselves impatient with Baumbach’s cozy self-reflective world of pampered middle-class intellectuals will not take any comfort here. – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

(Photo by Netflix)

How is the script?

Baumbach’s brilliant screenplay never falters or hits a wrong note… he writes scenes that are like verbal arias. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Expertly scripted by Baumbach as a showcase for subtle, natural monologuing. – Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

Marriage Story is at its best when it just the two leads talking in a room. – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

Baumbach has a real knack for witty, eccentric and yet natural-sounding dialogue – something which  Marriage Story  definitely lives up to. – Thomas Humphrey, ScreenAnarchy

Is it reminiscent of any other films ?

Kramer vs. Kramer , Scenes from a Marriage , and Shoot the Moon … Marriage Story makes a worthy addition to that canon. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

You may be reminded of  Kramer vs. Kramer , but that movie, for all its fireworks, was lopsided. – Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

Not since David Fincher’s Zodiac has a movie placed such absorbing emphasis on the jigsaw puzzle of searching for solutions that may never fully resolve themselves. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

The film that came to mind while watching Noah Baumbach’s punishingly incisive dissection of a messy break-up and divorce was… in fact Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park . – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

I was often reminded of Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale , a film I can watch multiple times and always find myself siding and empathizing with a different member of a combative, dysfunctional family. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Like Ingmar Bergman’s  Scenes from a Marriage  — an inevitable influence — this is a tough piece of work, steeped in pain. – Jon Frosch, Hollywood Reporter

Will it make us all feel miserable?

Somehow, in spite of the bleakness of the subject matter, it feels more redemptive than despairing. – Geoffrey Macnab, Independent

It’s wrenching stuff to be sure, but it’s also excruciatingly funny, loaded with empathy, compassion, and understanding. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Tonally, the film is mostly upbeat: Adam Driver makes for the nicest, friendliest, most lovable gaslighter in the history of cinema. – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

Baumbach seeks to mine his material for laughs, no matter how desperate the situation becomes. – Xan Brooks, Guardian

Marriage Story  puts you through the wringer, but leaves you exhilarated at having witnessed a filmmaker and his actors surpass themselves. – Jon Frosch, Hollywood Reporter

Does Baumbach do a good job mixing tones?

Baumbach performs a brilliant balancing act. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Sometimes the film’s erratic zaniness undermines the gnarly vérité of its darker moments, but mostly  Marriage Story  is well balanced. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Baumbach finds the perfect blend of humor, humanity, heart and yes, suffering, to create an utterly compelling, harrowingly three-dimensional portrait of divorce. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Speaking of balance, is the story one-sided?

Marriage Story may often resemble a tug of war between its stars, but it’s on both of their sides. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

Some will say  Marriage Story  favors Charlie… but Baumbach is at once hard on, and forgiving of, the two characters, and audience sympathies will likely seesaw. – Jon Frosch, Hollywood Reporter

Put it this way, in its core DNA, when it drifts off to sleep at night, Marriage Story ’s true heart is in New York (Baumbach’s home), not L.A. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

There’s a way in which Baumbach seems to want to tip the scales of sympathy toward the guy in the story—Nicole’s behavior sometimes comes off as a little too ruthless. – Stephanie Zacharek, Time

It’ll be interesting to see what side you come out on… whether or not you come out feeling that one side wins too heavily over the other in the war for your sympathy. – Thomas Humphrey, ScreenAnarchy

How are the performances ?

Johansson delivers brilliantly textured work. – Xan Brooks, Guardian

[Johansson’s] ability to carry some of the movie’s more frustrating showdowns illustrate her capacity to look stern and fragile at once. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Driver, in particular, the stand-out MVP if you had to name just one of the leads. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Props especially go to Adam Driver, who at times is the best I have yet seen him. – Thomas Humphrey, ScreenAnarchy

Driver gives a bold performance… his choices add great depth to the role as written: he would seem a natural for awards attention here. – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

Both manage to outdo themselves. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

The sensational leads deliver the deepest, most alive and attuned performances of their careers. – Jon Frosch, Hollywood Reporter

Both have major awards potential. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Are there any other standouts?

A phenomenal Laura Dern. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

One of the pleasures here lies in three tremendous performances from Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta as the LA lawyers who represent the couple. – Geoffrey Macnab, Independent

Alda’s real-life Parkinson’s tremors fuel what may be his saddest performance. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

All hail Julie Hagerty, utterly sublime as Nicole’s ditzy pant-suited wine mom. – David Jenkins, Little White Lies

Robertson eschews any and all artificial cute-kid tics and delivers a genuine performance. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Are there any big complaints?

The film can sometimes manipulate events into scenarios which aren’t entirely convincing. – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

Marriage Story   definitely doesn’t always get it right. It’s not entirely tonally pitch perfect. – Thomas Humphrey, ScreenAnarchy

Will it affect our own marriage?

It’s well worth your time. Maybe don’t watch it with your spouse, though. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Marriage Story also serves as a kind of horror movie preview, an inadvertent cautionary tale, that leaves you rushing to get home to your partner and treat them as well as possible for as long as possible. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Marriage Story  premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 29, 2019. It will open in limited theatrical release on November 6 and be available to stream on Netflix on December 6.

Marriage Story (2019) 95%

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‘marriage story’: film review | venice 2019.

Noah Baumbach's latest stars Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver as a couple embroiled in an increasingly bitter divorce.

By Jon Frosch

Senior Editor, Reviews

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Marriage Story   begins with a fake-out. Via voiceover, spouses Charlie ( Adam Driver ) and Nicole ( Scarlett Johansson ) enumerate the things, big and small, that they adore about each other: she’s an unparalleled listener, an expert gift giver, an “infectious” dancer; he’s a natural with their young son, a surprisingly great dresser, cries at movies. Glimpses of their shabby-chic domestic contentment are shown as a bittersweet Randy Newman score swells. It’s all warmly romantic in a grounded, adult way.

Alas, those lists aren’t Valentine’s Day cards Charlie and Nicole have written for one another, or an intimacy exercise meant to draw them closer. They’re something a mediator has asked the pair to cobble together to kick off their separation in good faith. On the surface, this is indeed not a tale of love, but of mounting mutual hostility — though as Noah Baumbach ’s wounding, masterly new film argues, the line between those sentiments can be agonizingly blurry.

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Release date: Nov 06, 2019

Viewers who dug the relative mellowness of Baumbach’s last effort, 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) , should brace themselves: Like Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage — an inevitable influence — this is a tough piece of work, steeped in pain that feels wincingly immediate (it’s based on Baumbach’s own divorce from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh) and unsparing in its willingness to observe, at sometimes startling emotional proximity, good people at their worst.

It’s also funny and, when you least expect it (and most need it), almost unbearably tender, thanks in large part to the sensational leads, who deliver the deepest, most alive and attuned performances of their careers. Marriage Story puts you through the wringer, but leaves you exhilarated at having witnessed a filmmaker and his actors surpass themselves.

Baumbach’s movies tend to elicit disapproving murmurs about navel-gazing and score-settling, and this will be no exception. It’s sturdy enough to withstand the criticism; few current American writer-directors are plumbing their personal histories as profoundly.

The juxtaposition of the film’s moony opening montage with the tense mediation scene that follows generates suspense: What went wrong between Charlie and Nicole? But Marriage Story finds Baumbach in an expectation-confounding mood; rather than a wistful postmortem of a failed romance à la Annie Hall , the movie offers a chronicle of conflictedness, and of how a relationship changes — flails, explodes, evolves — over the course of divorce proceedings. Along the way, we grasp the dynamic that led to this particular marital collapse, but that is neither Baumbach’s point nor his purpose.

When we meet them, Charlie is a Brooklyn theater director and Nicole, having turned down a few lucrative offers in Hollywood, his company’s leading lady. After they split up, Nicole takes their 8-year-old son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), and moves back to her native Los Angeles to shoot a TV pilot. She spends time with her daffy mother (Julie Hagerty), a former actress herself, and sister (the scene-stealing Merritt Wever). A new life starts to take form.

The challenge is figuring out where Charlie fits into it. Deciding to make their separation official, Nicole consults high-powered divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw (played to savage perfection by Laura Dern ). Staying friends with her ex-husband is the priority, Nicole insists. “We’ll do it as gently as possible,” Nora reassures her. Uh-huh.

Nicole tells Nora her side of the story, recounting how her identity — her ideas, personality and ambitions — gradually became secondary to, and then swallowed by, Charlie’s. The substance of the monologue is familiar: A woman finds herself shrinking in the shadow of her husband’s ego and needs. But Baumbach shoots it in a few long takes, the camera slowly closing in on Nicole, and the whirlpool of feelings Johansson conjures — the nostalgia, the churning vulnerability, the currents of shame and self-loathing — is astonishing.

Nicole’s desire to spend more time in L.A., we learn, was a major point of contention during the marriage, and remains so during the divorce. Though his work is still in New York, Charlie — after meeting with two drastically different lawyers ( Alan Alda and Ray Liotta , both in fine, mischievous form) — establishes part-time residency near Nicole in order to negotiate shared custody of Henry. A new normal is established, with pickups and drop-offs, exorbitant legal fees and awkward conversations.

The exes still care about each other, as is illustrated by two moments of gentle heartbreak — one in which Nicole trims Charlie’s hair, another in which she orders lunch for him at a settlement conference. Among the movie’s most piercing insights is that divorce, even when necessary, isn’t always intuitive; sometimes it’s an act of self-abnegation, contrary to what the heart wants and requiring an almost cruel degree of discipline.

It can also snowball, taking on proportions of unpleasantness that dwarf or obscure the reasons it was pursued in the first place. Other American films about divorce (a mini-canon that includes Kramer vs. Kramer , Shoot the Moon and, yes, The War of the Roses ) have portrayed this phenomenon — the legal process driving and shaping the couple’s feelings rather than vice versa — but none with the force and clarity of this one.

With the attorneys nudging them toward more aggressive stances, Charlie and Nicole face off in an argument of soul-shaking vitriol, their grievances surging forth like scorching lava. As the problems of their marriage are laid bare (his reflexive selfishness and infidelity, her tendency to cast herself as a victim), the scene captures more harrowingly than any I can remember how easily love can curdle into hate — the terrifying closeness of the two.

This all makes Marriage Story sound grimmer than it is. Baumbach has always been a master of high-toned cringe comedy, and there are laughs that leaven the mood here. A sequence in which Nicole’s mom and sister help her serve Charlie divorce papers is executed with giddy screwball snap. And when a poker-faced social worker (Martha Kelly) pays a visit to Charlie and Henry, the result is a stealth comic set piece that, in its unnerving way, is even more of a high-wire act than the swerve into country-house farce in Baumbach’s Mistress America .

Shooting on 35mm, the director — collaborating with DP Robbie Ryan — employs a spry, supple visual style, interspersing close-ups that capture subtle shifts in his actors’ faces with striking wider angles that draw attention to the physical distance between Charlie and Nicole, as well as their movements and body language around each other. The framing, staging and control over the flow of the action are confident, at times dazzling, though free of gratuitous flash or fuss. Objects, gestures and moments — a gate pulled shut, a shoelace being tied, an unexpected burst into song — are imbued, but never weighed down, with meaning. This is the work of a filmmaker in full command of his powers.

If there’s been a limitation in Baumbach’s movies, it’s a kind of narrowness in the conception of certain characters. Nicole Kidman’s monstrous mom in Margot at the Wedding and Driver’s insufferable hipster-fraud in While We’re Young , for example, contributed to a sense that those stories were rigged; there was no room to figure out what to make of these people, because Baumbach had already done it for us. Charlie and Nicole, on the other hand, are thrillingly complicated, written with a generous feel for the chaos and contradiction of human emotions.

Johansson can be a self-conscious performer, too busy chewing the inside of her mouth and gazing sultrily to really burrow into a role. Not so here. The actress makes you feel the clashing impulses and instincts — anger and longing, defiance and guilt, boldness and trepidation — in every step of Nicole’s transition into life without Charlie.

Driver has an even trickier task. Charlie isn’t an ostentatious narcissist like the patriarchs played by Jeff Daniels and Dustin Hoffman in Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale and The Meyerowitz Stories , respectively. He’s affable, affectionate and self-aware . But Charlie has had an eclipsing effect on the woman he loves, and Driver delivers a brilliantly inhabited and shaded portrait of a man who’s forced to reckon with that reality.

Some will say  Marriage Story favors Charlie. He’s the filmmaker’s surrogate, and the second half, in particular, centers on his perspective and experience. But Baumbach is at once hard on, and forgiving of, the two characters, and audience sympathies will likely seesaw. It’s a testament to the film that by the time it reaches its delicate knockout of a conclusion, despite all Charlie and Nicole have said and done, the maddening mess they’ve made of things, we’ve come to love them both.

Production companies: Heyday Films, Netflix Distributor: Netflix Writer-director: Noah Baumbach Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, Alan Alda, Julie Hagerty, Merritt Wever, Azhy Robertson Producers: Noah Baumbach, David Heyman Executive producer: Craig Shilowich Cinematography: Robbie Ryan Music: Randy Newman Editor: Jennifer Lame Production design: Jade Healy Costume design: Mark Bridges Casting: Douglas Aibel, Francine Maisler Venue: Venice International Film Festival (Competition)

136 minutes

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‘Marriage Story’ review: A great movie you may never want to see again

Noah Baumbach’s remarkably scripted and spectacularly acted “Marriage Story” might just as well have been called “End of a Marriage Story.” It might also be a great movie I never want to see again, though it is too early to tell: Its nuclear-family fallout has not quite settled.

“Marriage Story” makes observations that are probably priceless in a world where divorce has become so common that it is quite a bit like death: It happens every day. It goes virtually unnoticed by the people who are not directly affected. It lays waste to the ones who are.

Noah Baumbach’s remarkably scripted new film might just as well have been called “End of a Marriage Story.”

With a score by Randy Newman and supporting cast that includes Wallace Shawn, Brooke Bloom, Alan Alda and Julie Hagerty, the film also includes a lot of what might be called unbecoming conduct. (“The system rewards bad behavior,” says the shark-like lawyer Nora Fanshaw, played by force-of-nature Laura Dern.) It also stars movie man of the moment Adam Driver , along with Scarlett Johansson. He is a director named Charlie, she is an actress named Nicole, and both are parents to Henry (Azhy Robertson), who is, appropriately, uncharming: A child whose parents are splitting up should not have to be Justin Henry in “Kramer vs. Kramer” (a film with obvious parallels) to earn our sympathy.

Few of the characters go morally unscathed in what is a sometimes harrowing trip to family court. One who does is Bert (played by Alda), the slightly doddering attorney whom Charlie first hires. He is given the film’s best line: “Criminal lawyers see bad people at their best; divorce lawyers see good people at their worst.” Among the points that Baumbach is making—especially by having performers play performers—is that life is an act, and the poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage often does so shoehorned into unfamiliar and even hostile parts.

Few of the characters go morally unscathed in what is a sometimes harrowing trip to family court.

Nicole, for instance, has decided that being a wife to Charlie has finally meant sacrificing too much of herself. Charlie, though temperamentally inclined to a degree of self-doubt, thought he was doing O.K. Both are equally wrong. They resist falling into the pit of recriminations and legalistic dirty pool as long as they can. But they have attorneys, so they are lost.

Charlie eventually ends up with Jay, a more or less stereotypical courtroom carnivore played by a very persuasive Ray Liotta. Nicole’s lawyer, Nora, who is a stand-in for the devil, resorts to socio-religious arguments in getting Nicole to embrace her more ruthless instincts and present herself to the court as squeaky clean and righteously maternal. After all, Nora says, the standard by which women are judged within “our Judeo-Christian whatever” is based on the Virgin Mary. “She’s a virgin who gives birth,” sputters Nora, who, prolonging the metaphor, says, “God is the father and God doesn’t show up.” Meaning that men get away with everything.

The way viewers read “Marriage Story” may well come down to what sex they are. 

Charlie does not seem able to get away with anything. He is no angel, but he wins our sympathy. At least I think he does. The way viewers read “Marriage Story” may well come down to what sex they are and what their romantic-marital-legal experience has been. Both Driver and Johansson give epic performances. She has what felt like an uninterrupted, 10-or-so-minute scene at the film’s beginning during which Nicole explains her plight. It feels, to some degree, like an improvisation at the Actors Studio, but that is the point. She is an actress who commits herself to a role, and the role she has now chosen is divorcée. Charlie, given an emotionally naked portrayal by Driver, is less able to hide, though both should, occasionally. There is a scene toward the end of the film in which Charlie and Nicole have an understandable but nevertheless embarrassing meltdown that will have audiences feeling like intruders. “Whew,” I said to myself. “This is a movie, isn’t it?”

Baumbach’s own divorce from the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh may have inspired this film, and this is only worth mentioning because “Marriage Story” so profoundly feels sprung from someone’s real-life experience. At the same time, we are keenly aware that people are acting—and always are. The double-montage introduction, which serves as a flashback to the blissful years of being “Charlie and Nicole,” partners in both work and life, is pure Woody Allen, with idealized New York people tossing about bon mots and only doing significant work, when they do work, their comings and going executed with perfect timing. The whole thing smacks of one of those New York Times Style features—one of which is actually framed on a wall, about Charlie and Nicole, headlined “Scenes from a Marriage.”

The Bergman film of the same name was a big influence on Allen, and Allen is an influence on Baumbach. “Marriage Story” might have been the nightmare sequel to “Annie Hall,” if Annie and Alvy Singer weren’t old enough now to be Charlie and Nicole’s grandparents (and had actually gotten married). At the risk of prolonging the literary allusion above, “Marriage Story” is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing short of a reappraisal of marriage and divorce and the casualness with which both are entered into. It also suggests, without saying so, that when one applies for a marriage license there ought to be a test.

John Anderson is a television critic for The Wall Street Journal and a contributor to The New York Times.

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‘Marriage Story’ Film Review: Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver Break Apart in Noah Baumbach’s Devastating Drama

The writer-director’s streak of humane, heartbreaking films continues with this powerful and poignant tale

“Marriage Story” opens with spouses Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) each reciting a list of everything they love and admire about each other. It’s almost unbearably adorable, so much so that writer-director Noah Baumbach immediately pulls out the rug: These lists are an exercise assigned by a counselor who’s seeing the couple through their divorce.

Over the course of this poignant, hilarious, heartbreaking saga, Baumbach performs an incisive autopsy on this couple. As their breakup brings out the best and worst of them, we will learn why they worked so well together and why they needed to separate from each other; if there’s a plot or traditional dramatic tension here, it’s over whether or not these two can remain amicable enough to stay close to each other and to be effective parents to their son, Henry (Azhy Robertson, “After the Wedding”).

Baumbach performs a brilliant balancing act throughout; I was often reminded of Arnaud Desplechin’s “A Christmas Tale,” a film I can watch multiple times and always find myself siding and empathizing with a different member of a combative, dysfunctional family. Just when it seems like the film might be presenting Nicole or Charlie as the sole wronged party, the script provides new information or veers in another direction. We love them both and we get irritated with them both, but we mainly want Henry to be OK.

Complicating matters is the bi-coastal nature of the divorce; Charlie is an acclaimed New York theater director, and actress/L.A. native Nicole goes home to shoot a pilot, taking Henry with her. Once legal proceedings begin, Henry’s placement on the west coast means lots of flights back and forth for Charlie, not to mention contending with California partnership laws, something that their respective teams of lawyers are only too happy to do, for a high hourly rate. (Those lawyers are also happy to pick apart every wrong thing Nicole or Charlie have ever said or done, with relish.)

Representing Nicole is Nora (Laura Dern, in full “Big Little Lies” mode), a smooth talker who’s an accomplished Divorcée Whisperer but no less ruthless in the courtroom than Charlie’s eventual attorney Jay, a suited shark that gives Ray Liotta one of his meatiest roles in ages. (Charlie’s first attorney is the older and more laconic but no less pragmatic Bert, played memorably by Alan Alda.)

Baumbach makes the Los Angeles digs you’d expect from any New York-based filmmaker — partisans of L.A. go a little glassy-eyed and talk about “the space” as one of the city’s main selling points — but without the vitriol of, say, “Annie Hall.” And contrasting the two cities is just one of the challenges for cinematographer Robbie Ryan (“The Favourite”), who clearly relishes the delineations of spaces like Nicole and Charlie’s Brooklyn apartment versus the San Fernando Valley home of Nicole’s mom Sandra (Julie Hagerty), or how the intimacy of Charlie’s New York rehearsal space differs from the cavernous soundstage where Nicole shoots her pilot.

With “Marriage Story,” Baumbach cements his reputation as one of this generation’s leading humanist filmmakers. Since 2005, he’s had an extraordinary run of films — “The Squid and the Whale,” “Margot at the Wedding,” “Greenberg,” “While We’re Young,” “Mistress America,” “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” and his masterpiece, “Frances Ha” — with deeply flawed, often exasperating characters who are nonetheless always capable of growth and redemption. This latest film certainly fits that category, and it once again demonstrates Baumbach’s ability to get the best from his performers. It’s difficult to call either Johansson or Driver a “revelation” here on the heels of so much strong work in recent years, but both manage to outdo themselves.

Both characters run a gamut from narcissism to compassion, and these actors fill in every shading. And while the two leads carry much of the movie, the ensemble provides plenty of delight as well, with Hagerty and Alda getting some of their meatiest material in recent memory, Wallace Shawn stealing some scenes as an aging theater lothario, and Robertson eschewing any and all artificial cute-kid tics and delivering a genuine performance. (He’s so natural that I assumed he was a first-timer; I was surprised to discover later that he plays a key role in one of the best “SNL” bits of the past few years, “Wells for Boys.”)

“Marriage Story” falls in line with a tradition of great films about the messiness of relationships, and Baumbach acknowledges his predecessors — a framed New York Times profile of Nicole and Charlie hanging in Sandra’s house is headlined “Scenes from a Marriage,” after Ingmar Bergman’s incisive look at an uncoupling, and both Nicole and Charlie separately perform numbers from Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” also about the complexity of intimacy. (Adam Driver’s bravura one-take rendition of one of the show’s most powerful songs, incidentally, makes you want to see him star in a revival.)

One wonders if Baumbach left references to “Kramer vs. Kramer” or “Two for the Road” on the cutting-room floor, but either way, “Marriage Story” is a film that deserves to be mentioned in their company. It’s devastating, essential, and destined to be remembered long after this awards cycle ends.

“Marriage Story” premieres on Netflix on Dec. 6.

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Writer-director Noah Baumbach has mined his own life for some sort of inspiration in many past movies including his college days in Kicking and Screaming,  his parents’ divorce in The Squid and the Whale and turning 40 in  While We’re Young. But now I have to use the “M-word” to describe his latest, and that would be, simply, masterpiece. But don’t go into it with all those lofty expectations because this is a movie that will sneak up on you, one you can relate to no matter what your marital status.

It’s heartbreaking, funny, touching, exceedingly smart, entertaining, enlightening and complex look at what can happen with those you choose to love. Marriage Story  will grab you by the heart like no other movie this year.

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Adam Driver is Charlie, a New York theater director, and Scarlett Johansson is Nicole, an actress. They have an 8-year-old kid (Azhy Robertson) and are good parents. As the montage that opens the Netflix film shows, the couple has a deep understanding of what they love most about each other. Nicole was a child actress and born to the West Coast. Charlie is right out of the East Coast and wants to go back. This becomes almost as much about the lure of those two places as it is a stunning love story that happens to be about a divorce. Drifting apart, career goals and life choices taking their toll on their relationship.

This is a movie alternately funny, sad, wise, angry, warm and real that explores the pain of breaking up but the need to keep the family together. It is full of heartbreak, but you also laugh out loud, especially as a trio of lawyers gets involved in the proceedings and take things to uncomfortable places. It is a series of scenes from a marriage that comes at us with the force of the things of life. Just as you might have a sense of recognition as Charlie and Nicole narrate the list of things they like about each other, a devastating scene revolving around an intense argument on the things they don’t like proves it gets a little complicated. There are no easy answers here as these two continue to discover themselves, and each other, in ways married and unmarried.

Baumbach wrote his script with the experience of his own divorce (from Jennifer Jason Leigh) and much research with couples in marriages of various status. It is a knowing piece of writing that has no villains, just human beings trying to figure it all out. With Driver and Johansson delivering the two best performances of their careers, we are in good hands. The supporting cast could not be better, including the three divorce lawyers you won’t soon forget. Laura Dern is sensational as Nicole’s aggressive lawyer, hilariously at times teaching her the importance of winning. Alan Alda is the too-nice Bert Spitz, who Charlie hopes could get the job done in a good way but soon discovers he can’t. So Ray Liotta’s bulldog of a lawyer, Jay, comes into the picture and goes for the jugular. They all are great, as is the rest of a cast that includes such stalwarts as Julie Hagerty and Merritt Wever as lesser-known performers like Martha Kelly, as the “evaluator” checking up on Charlie and his son, who nails her small role to perfection. It is a terrific ensemble.

Baumbach takes his story in surprising places, crossing movie genres from comedy to drama, Hitchcock to musicals — a sequence featuring a couple of songs from the Broadway show Company  is a standout, with Driver giving new meaning to its signature song, “Being Alive” — and many more influences cinematically. This is a film that is just best to discover, a deeply personal one that may hit different people in different ways. At a recent Q&A, Dern called this film “a gift.” It is.

Check out my video review by clicking the link above. Producers are David Heyman and Baumbach. It starts a limited monthlong theatrical run on Wednesday and begins streaming on Netflix in early December.

Do you plan to see  Marriage Story?  Let us know what you think.

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Marriage Story Review: Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson’s Best Work

Marriage Story is Noah Baumbach's funny and poignant meditation on divorce, one with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson's best work.

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Charlie and Nicole are the married couple on the train. You’d be forgiven if you didn’t notice though. Despite the pair being the toast of Off-Off-Broadway, with him the prestigious director of an underfunded theater company and her its brightest star, when they come back from a party, they’re not on the same page—they’re not even on the same subway bench. Nicole sits quietly on the 3 train’s empty pew, and Charlie stands across the aisle, despondent. They are still together, and given their marriage story includes the birth of a loved son, they always will be, in a way. But they’re headed in different directions even when they’re on the same track.

This is one of the many provocative images percolating in Noah Baumbach’s sweet and unexpectedly warm film about the end of a marriage, but not entirely the love it was built upon. Forty years after Robert Benton essayed the struggles of divorce with the solemnity of a war crime in Kramer vs. Kramer , Baumbach crafts a more complex, intimate, and funnier film that makes the pain of truly irreconcilable differences all the bitterer. It is Baumbach’s most mature effort to date, and one that offers career-defining turns for its two leads, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson .

Fittingly having just debuted at the New York Film Festival , Marriage Story is defined by its NYC identity. In fact, it’s that insistent outer borough charm which proves the catalyst for a divorce that begins amicably and ends with lawyers gleeful about a “street fight” in court. For while Nicole (Johansson) admires that Charlie (Driver) is the transplant who is more New Yorker than any narive, she’s never really felt rooted there. Ten years after she moved to the city and gave up a budding film career to be with Charlie, she’s taken a television pilot back in Los Angeles, which also just happens to be where her mother and sister are… and where she and Charlie were married, as well as where their son was born.

That distinction of marriage licenses and son Henry’s (Azhy Robertson) birth certificate turns out to be titanic as far as the legal system is concerned. Charlie might be a great father, but he is also greatly involved in his own work and self-image as an emerging Broadway wunderkind, and he can no more imagine living in the sunny soullessness of LA than he can in a world where Henry isn’t nearby. But he might have to choose as, for the first time in years, Nicole is actually pursuing what she wants, especially after taking a meeting with high-powered SoCal attorney Nora (Laura Dern).

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As one of the most idiosyncratic and dry screenwriting voices of his generation, Baumbach has infused his many scripts with the pain of growing up. Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha struggles in hipster Brooklyn like a millennial Annie Hall, and Gerwig’s very different screwball protagonist in Mistress America is still unsure how friends could ever settle down in the Connecticut suburbs. But with his two most recent efforts between The Meyerowitz Stories and Marriage Story , Baumbach has focused on less easily solvable problems.

In tackling divorce, the director is as insistent as his characters that he doesn’t want to turn this into a battle of wills or venomous accusations, but by nature of what Charlie and Nicole are going through, the hurt feelings and recriminations are inevitable. Beginning the movie on sweet, parallel notes of praise each party wrote about the other during an arbitration session, the film glides through the good times via montage—and then never lets those brief remembrances go. It is perhaps those fleeting feelings that allows Charlie, who is clearly built on Baumbach’s own knowing experiences with a bicoastal divorce, to be so delusional to think that divorce will neither affect his directing work or his relationship with his son.

Still, Marriage Story has few illusions. While the picture favors Charlie’s vantage on the whole while he struggles mightily to fly between California and New York to see his son—including by being forced to rent an apartment in Los Angeles in order to legally argue Henry should live in New York—it’s also acutely aware of his own selfish hypocrisies. There is something perfect about the metaphor of the husband as a director and the wife as the most prized member of his ensemble. She might be his favorite actress, but at the end of the day she is a pawn for his vision, and one increasingly seen by all those around them as an accessory to his career’s ascension.

Johansson, in the best work of her career, carries an indignation that is still too formless to identify as resentment. Yet it forms an invisible chain around her neck. In her first meeting with Dern, love turns to frustration and then exasperation as she relives a decade in a moment. It’s about a five-minute soliloquy that encapsulates years.

And the lawyer she tells this too also underlines Baumbach’s unmistakably droll sensibility. While things become evermore heated as Nicole and Charlie head toward court, and Henry begins forgetting that he also lives with his father, the movie maintains a gallows sensibility. It manifests in moments like Dern’s preternaturally ingratiating attorney taking off her shoes while listening to a sob story, or the way she can be all hugs and kisses with Ray Liotta as the slimiest lawyer in LA. But it can also be found in the amusing way that Nicole and her mother Sandra (Julie Hagerty) bicker about whether Sandra will still be friends with Charlie. “You might be getting divorced, but Charlie and I have a special relationship that’ll last forever!”

Reminiscent of the more sophisticated comedies of the ‘70s, there is a pervasive melancholy throughout Marriage Story that makes the laughs more ludicrous and the subsequent reality unbearable. Through it all Johansson and Driver offer peerless work. One special highlight is near the end of the film where Charlie, ever the showman, can finally find the words to express his anguish by singing (in full) a musical number by Stephen Sondheim. It’s a devastating crescendo of bottled up emotion. Finally, the workaholic artist who cannot find the words to direct his own life bares it all. It is a true high-note after the preceding two hours, which featured its own chorus of tears and smiles, and an acceptance that even after the final curtain. the feelings left behind will always linger. Including the love story that remains.

4.5 out of 5

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

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In Marriage Story , Noah Baumbach’s Self-Pity Comes With Stretches of Brilliance

Noah Baumbach doesn’t do adaptations of other people’s work, opting instead to mine his own emotional fissures for dramatic gold. He tends to go for the ugliest nuggets — the jagged shards, which draw blood on extraction. In the wake of his alliance with the director and actress Greta Gerwig, Baumbach has shown signs of groping toward a more hopeful stance — i.e., a belief in the human capacity to change and grow. But it’s all relative. Even calling his divorce story Marriage Story and adding wistful harmonies by Randy Newman (as well as a climactic cri de coeur by Stephen Sondheim), Baumbach can’t entirely camouflage his sour self-pity.

With that self-pity comes, as usual, stretches of brilliance, none more glittering than the prologue: two lyrical, illustrated monologues, a wife’s tender paean to her husband’s most lovable traits and a husband’s tender paean to hers. The words are simultaneously true and beside the point, since the monologues have come at the direction of a mediator who likes to begin on a positive note, to remind divorcing couples what once they prized in each other. In a dramatic coup, the wife refuses to read what she wrote aloud — what we heard was apparently an imaginary read — and angrily decamps, leaving a befuddled hubby. So much for positivity.

The husband is Charlie (Adam Driver), a MacArthur “genius” grant winner who directs a New York avant-garde theater troupe, the wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), an L.A.-bred actress who has been working with Charlie’s company but now has a chance to return to L.A. (and the showbiz spotlight) for a major TV role. At issue is their issue, little Henry (Azhy Robertson), whom neither wishes to have on the other side of the continent. For his part, Charlie doesn’t seem set on the divorce. He’s moving slowly, mulishly, weighed down by the prospect of being alone and — quite possibly — an Angeleno.

Try as you might, it’s hard to separate the fictional from the true. Nicole is obviously modeled on Baumbach’s ex-wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, with whom he had a son. Like Nicole, Leigh grew up in a Hollywood showbiz family, very (perhaps too?) close to her mother and sister, and she gained fame doffing her top in a landmark teen comedy. (If there’s a muddling of fact, it’s that Phoebe Cates’s topless scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High is remembered more vividly than Leigh’s.) Johansson has Leigh’s recognizable mix of earnest good nature and neuroticism. She’s smart but also skittery, undefended.

The connection between Charlie and Baumbach is less one-to-one — so much less that it seems a bit unfair. Charlie is certainly a tad overbearing. Did he stifle Nicole by keeping her in New York, away from her people? So she says. Did he muzzle her creativity by refusing to let her direct? That’s the charge. He admits he slept once with a stage manager of no importance, but only because Nicole hadn’t had sex with him in over a year, and what’s a guy to do, really? And surely that MacArthur grant tells you he’s a great artist, someone who puts his very soul into his work. Doesn’t that count for something? Now, Charlie is paying hard for his inattention and brief (but not unjustified) dalliance. Divorcing in L.A. rather than New York means Nicole stays in the bosom of her family while Charlie is all by his lonesome in a sterile pied-à-terre, 3,000 miles from his artistic family, not just among strangers but driven, phony L.A. strangers. It dawns on him that this is what he gets for being self-centered, but his self-centeredness seems so reasonable and his comeuppance so harsh that the autocriticism has no sting. He’s too dopey and lovable to regard as a threat to a normal woman’s self-esteem, and there’s no third party in the mix to complicate the picture.

What draws you into Marriage Story isn’t the particulars but the form, the attack . Each star has a scene or three in which she or he babbles and rails and walks in and out of the frame, going for broke in the way of actors in semi-improvised psychodramas rather than, say, billion-dollar fantasy franchises. I don’t think audiences and critics are wowed by anything Nicole and Charlie actually say (see Kenneth Lonergan’s director’s cut of Margaret for revelatory pipelines to the psyche) but the fact that they’re saying it at such a high, theatrical pitch, in ways that make crews applaud when “cut” is called. (“That was the Oscar take!”) Driver is a big guy with big but not always expressive features — his face can be a mask, his manner groggy, unfocused. But here he’s center stage and close up, laboring to burn through that mask and shake off that grogginess, and his drive toward being present connects with his character’s, and makes him very affecting. Johansson is even more vivid, her hair sheared to give her no tresses to twiddle or hide behind, her need for reassurance right there on the surface. But Nicole recedes in the story when the lawyers take over and put Charlie through the wringer. It’s his divorce story, not hers.

Baumbach’s main characters are written and acted straight as befits their personal integrity, but the rest of Marriage Story is done in a satirist’s broad strokes — a penetrating, often inspired satirist. Laura Dern plays Nicole’s lawyer (the description “high-powered” is unavoidable), Nora Fanshaw, and Dern’s genius is in nailing Fanshaw’s genius for creating an intimacy with her clients that’s both genuine and calculated. (My heart fluttered when Nicole told Charlie about her new lawyer and added, “I feel like we could be friends with her.” Nicole is such an easy mark.) Ray Liotta is in clover as Jay, Fanshaw’s counterpart on Charlie’s side, the actor’s glassy deadpan the perfect vehicle for Jay’s practiced — at times virtuosic — cynicism. The idea is that Dern and Liotta’s characters are scorched-earth advocates, drawing blood even as their respective clients writhe at the damage being done. Alan Alda is marvelous as Burt Spitz, the elderly, menschy attorney to whom Charlie turns when he’s spooked by Jay’s legalistic shivs — and who demonstrates to Charlie that, in this context, “human decency” translates as “impotence.” The incomparable Merritt Wever does much with her little as Nicole’s dotty, untethered sister, but Julie Hagerty’s charm can’t quite compensate for the cheap shots at her character, Nicole’s mother, who subtly undermines her daughters by allying herself with their exes.

The best things in Marriage Story are small moments that resonate like mad, my favorite being when Nicole makes a bad-taste joke to Charlie about her mothering skills and quickly adds, “That was a joke,” to which Charlie responds eagerly that he knows, and he feels the way she does about the harsh spotlight that distorts them both. The worst things are the intended showstoppers. I could live with Nicole, her mother, and her sister performing Sondheim’s Anderson Sisters-like trio from Company , “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” because it’s goofy and high-spirited, but Driver’s much-lauded one-shot performance of the same musical’s “Being Alive” made me cringe. The song dramatizes the moment when Company ’s Bobby realizes that he wants someone to regularly pop his bubble of self-containment, to vary his days, to force him to care, and it’s a big deal in the context of the show (though some people prefer the song that it replaced, the more ambivalent “Marry Me a Little”). It’s a good ending — for Company , where it has been carefully set up by Bobby’s two-plus-hour insistence that marriage is hell and freedom takes precedence over commitment. Having complained about Baumbach’s penchant for looking at things in their ugliest light, I have to say that the opposite — a sudden, spurious harmony, a Sondheim ex machina — is even less satisfying. Couldn’t Baumbach have come up with own damn epiphany?

*A version of this article appears in the November 25, 2019, issue of  New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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Marriage Story (United States, 2019)

Although Baumbach limits his inherent tendencies toward pretentiousness, there are still occasional hints of intellectual snobbishness to be found. While many of the situation’s emotions are universal – and it’s to the director’s credit that he presents them so honestly on screen – the main characters are not normal, average people. They exist in a bubble and their problems, obviously real to them, may seem somewhat trite to those who live less privileged lives. There are times when it becomes difficult to ignore the whiff of entitlement that permeates the production. Although we can connect with the characters as fellow human beings enduring emotional trauma, it’s difficult to feel for them on a deeper level. That, in many ways, highlights a critical difference between Marriage Story and the superior 1980 Oscar winner, Kramer vs. Kramer .

Much like Kramer vs. Kramer , this is an exploration of a marriage by autopsy. When the movie begins, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) are in the process of splitting up. The only time we are exposed to “happier days” are during the two affecting monologues/montages that open the proceedings: presentations of what each appreciates about the other. This bit of filmmaking is Baumbach at his best. It gives viewers a sense of what was lost and, more importantly, of the characters’ awareness of what they no longer have. Most films about divorce focus on the bitterness that develops. In this case, it establishes that there’s a lot more than anger and divisiveness between these two.

There are times during Marriage Story when the viewer may wonder whether the relationship might be salvageable. The characters consider the same thing. For a while, Charlie harbors the delusion that his wife might come home to him but Nicole needs to grow and, to do so, she has to sacrifice her marriage. Caught in the middle is Henry and, although both parents protest that he’s the most important thing, that doesn’t stop them from spending his college money paying off lawyers to fight for crumbs. Henry, like far too many children in custody disputes, is a pawn. The boy’s interests become secondary to “winning.” (A point that’s hammered home by Nora when she explains to Nicole her rationale for proposing an unbalanced “time of possession” agreement.)

Kramer vs. Kramer succeeded in large part because of stellar performances by Oscar-winners Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. In Marriage Story , the portrayals of Adam Driver and especially Scarlett Johansson stand on the same plateau. Although Driver has an awkward moment or two, he is believable as a controlling narcissist who sees himself as a victim. Johansson, giving the best performance of her career (eclipsing her sublime work in Lost in Translation ), exposes every nuance of a character who loves the man she’s leaving but can no longer stand the cage in which she finds herself. She digs deep, perhaps plumbing emotions from her two failed marriages, with remarkable results.

For Baumbach, Marriage Story represents a step away from elitist filmmaking toward something more accessible. The film’s themes and emotions are universal and he shows great sensitivity in his depiction of the personal toll of a divorce while simultaneously illustrating the ugliness that results when lawyers become involved. Some may find the subject matter too raw or uncomfortable but its widespread availability via Netflix assures audiences an opportunity to see Driver as more than Kylo Ren and Johansson as going well beyond Black Widow.

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, back to black.

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Director Sam Taylor-Johnson ’s “Back to Black” invokes a single question, one fans of Amy Winehouse are sure to recognize: What kind of f*ckery is this? The Camden-bred superstar, played by Marisa Abela , was famously “just one of the girls.” Down to earth, charming, witty, and, when she opened her mouth, a dazzling performer with an unbelievably soulful voice. Infamously, those who remember Amy will also recall a brutal struggle with addiction and leeching media frenzies that followed her to her death at age 27 from alcohol poisoning in the summer of 2011. 

“Back to Black” chronicles the years between the success of 2003's breakthrough  Frank and the blowup of the film's titular album in 2006. But if you expect to learn about Amy the person or even Amy the musician, temper your expectations. Taylor-Johnson’s film, penned by Matt Greenhalgh , is concerned with Amy the addict , making “Back to Black” a dreadful, dastardly attempt at a biopic.

If there’s one assumption to be made about any musician’s biographical drama film, it’s that it will be music-centric. While “Back to Black” has plenty of performances highlighting some of Amy’s most famous songs, they are almost exclusively used for simple soundtrack and pity fodder rather than essential structure. They almost feel like flippant reminders to portray Amy as a performer rather than solely the emotional wreck they characterize her as. The film allots next to none of its runtime to the actual making of either album. We are given fractional context to her artistry, only minor bullet points, like a single guitar-in-the-bed songwriting sesh and a cheeky Mark Ronson namedrop.

"Back to Black" misunderstands Amy’s legacy. The film doesn’t permit unfamiliar audiences to be privy to her iconicity. It doesn’t showcase the ravenous support from her hometown and country, the way they rallied behind her, or the transition of her fame to the States. It neglects to acknowledge any of the reasons why Amy and her music were so beloved. Very little of her actual career is touched on in the film. Instead, it plays more like a montage of toxic romance, drug use, and impromptu tattoos. 

Many of the onstage moments serve to show issues with sobriety or the mournful longing she feels for her on-and-off boyfriend and eventual husband, Blake (Jack O’Connell). The singular clip we’re given of the making of Back to Black is a moment of her tearfully recording the titular track, declaring, “he’s killed me,” and hard cutting to a leap in time where Amy is in the deepest throes of substance abuse. Not even her addiction, the film’s misguided though central focus is given thoughtful narrative—it’s just something that happens off-screen. It’s treated with cut-to-the-chase rapidity because, as the film sees it, we know it happens anyway. 

Abela gives a valiant effort in her performance, loosely capturing Amy’s onstage mannerisms and idiosyncratic dancing. But gesture is not essence, and there’s always a distracting artifice to her depiction. Amy Winehouse's charisma and charm were almost as famous as her voice, and Abela’s hollow copy and exaggerated accent put her out of her depth in attempting to replicate them. 

If the film’s navel-gazing take on defining Amy by drug use wasn’t criminal enough, the script treats these struggles and her eventual death as matters of fate: an end bound to her from the beginning. Every reach for a beer or glass of wine is dramatized like a smug nod to what we know is coming. From the top of the film, Amy is portrayed as a philandering, snarky silver tongue, a criminal to the love lives of others and a fated victim to her own heart. Blake is treated like a casualty to the irrepressible storm of her out-of-control nature, and her father, a powerless, wishful supporter, even though simple biography dictates otherwise. Neither of these men is fully to blame, but omitting their enabling and exacerbation of Amy’s vulnerabilities is irresponsible to the dignity of history. Amy is portrayed as a naive and directionless mess, and all the while, the music is never the cornerstone of the story. It begs the question: Why was this film made? 

When we reflect on pop culture’s past with 2024 eyes, looking back on how the media and public treated Amy, we recall the exploitation with disgust. We compare it to Britney and vow to do better next time. The hopeful implication here would be that we could honor Winehouse’s story better in death than in her life, yet this expectation sets the viewer up for failure. While Taylor-Johnson directs scenes that seem to shake their head at the oppressive paps that tail Amy’s every move, her film fails to do anything different. There’s a gross level of romanticization and infantilization that hemorrhages any hint of life force from this story. The same sensationalist treatment she attempts to scoff at is integral to the story she’s chosen to tell. Taylor-Johnson’s predatory, voyeuristic eye never fails to capitalize on the strife of Amy’s addiction without providing empathy or care. It renders the music purely as a consequence of a proposed penchant for pain and poor choices, depicting its hero as pathetic. 

“Back to Black” makes a martyr of its subject, flattening Amy Winehouse's life and music to a series of binges and failure to overcome heartbreak. It viciously strips her of any agency or humanity, positing her to be nothing more than a tragedy with an iconic album. While there’s no way to separate Amy’s biography from her addiction, to conflate it with her entire existence, sidelining personhood and omitting the pillars of her legacy is an offensive approach to storytelling. 

For fans who love her, this film is a heart-wrenching watch for all the wrong reasons, and for any of the true loved ones she’s left behind, the impact feels as if it can only be devastating. “Back to Black” spotlights the same dialogue in its introduction as in its final act, Amy laments, “I want to be remembered as a singer. I want to be remembered for my voice." Yet, the film hardly remembers her for more than her darkest moments, a posthumous “too bad” that will leave many leaving the theater disturbed.

Peyton Robinson

Peyton Robinson is a freelance film writer based in Chicago, IL. 

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122 minutes

Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse

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‘The Young Wife’ Review: The Nervous Bride Saga Gets a Sumptuous, Stylized Makeover

This whirling, quasi-fairytale, starring Kiersey Clemons and featuring Judith Light and Sheryl Lee Ralph, confirms writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s idiosyncratic vision

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Just because Celestina, the soon-to-be young wife in the “ The Young Wife ” told friends and family that while the honor of their presence was requested, they would be attending a party, not a wedding, doesn’t make it so. The weight of family, community and ritual aren’t so easily evaded. Or embraced.

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If Poe’s 2019 debut “Selah and the Spades”— set amid the cliques at an East Coast prep school — tossed and teased the high-school meanies genre, this film plies the fairytale quandaries of a female protagonist with creative jukes toward Black futurism. The look is sumptuous, stylized: honoring the natural world of the location (it was shot in Savannah, Georgia) while resisting any realism (the smartly defiant production design is the work of Rocio Gimenez) beyond Celestina’s authentic doubts.

The drama (and prickly comedy) of the day unfolds in a cabin with far too many vintage television sets, often playing worrying news reports or showing the TV sage Meditation Mary (Lovie Simone) sounding a chime and conducting a meditation minute. While the guests often heed the bell’s sound, Celestina is going to need more than 60 seconds to calm down. It can’t be an accident that while she struggles with the meaning of being a wife, she also hurriedly attends to all the domestic tidying associated with the role.

Here, the slightly askew rubs up against more familiar intergenerational lessons of love and life, most of them delivered by a trio of women who’ve seen some things, embodied by three formidable actors who’ve shown us a thing or two over the years.

Celestina’s mother is played with amusing hauteur by Sheryl Lee Ralph. If Angelique could have arrived via chariot to the vast property in the marshlands her late husband cultivated for her, she might have. Instead, she walks in wearing a sunshine yellow ensemble, a knowing look and harboring concerns about her only child’s future.

River’s mother Lara has a flower in her hair and a list of things for her (and by extension Celestina and River) to do before the wedding. Because Michaela Watkins pulls off the loopy love of maternal neurosis as Lara, it falls to Lara’s daughters (Aya Cash and Sandy Honig) to buzz around offering unsolicited insights to the bride-to-be.

And then there’s Cookie. With her wry smile and shock of periwinkle hair, Light’s character is decidedly tough but also growing weary of life. Whether drinking vodka, passing a joint, or just staring out toward the pine barrens with Celestina, it’s clear the two have forged a deep connection — so deep that Cookie presses her granddaughter-in-law to uphold her decision to die.

The right to die could seem like one theme too many — climate change and late capitalism also figure prominently — but aren’t weddings (at least those depicted onscreen) always inviting other people’s agendas into the mix?

River (singer Leon Bridges ) doesn’t make an appearance until mid-film, though his presence flows through the film from the get-go. Still, the first time we meet the presumptive groom it’s as a mellifluous, calming voice in Celestina’s ear as she listens to him on the phone. When he does finally come through the door, he’s wearing a braided man-bun, all soulful hipster.

We already know that he left his career as a lawyer to become a baker. What he has only recently learned — although not from Celestina — is that she quit her corporate job as a financial analyst the day before their nuptials. The scene of that conflagration plays in flashback. If we you needed to know why she left a six-figure gig, her uninvited colleague Dave (Jon Rudnitsky) crashes the party to make clear what toxic wealth can look like.

Gifted cinematographer Jomo Fray’s camera mimics Celestina’s whirling doubts. The film’s sound design underscores the aliveness of the day with an incessantly ringing landline, building winds and the chattery racket of guests who are free and easy because it’s not their wedding. Poe lets the noise of overlapping conversations swallow up everyone’s points until the point is the cacophony of freighted, albeit celebratory, gatherings. And while the score (Terence Nance) hints at the future with its electronic notes, the songs never forget the romance.

Reviewed via screening link May 28. Running time: 98 minutes.

• Production: Republic Pictures Paramount. FilmNation Entertainment presents an Archer Gray Production. Producers: Anne Casey, Tayarisha Poe. Executive Producer: Glenn Basner, Milan Popelka, Alison Cohen, Ashely Fox, Amy Nauiokas
• Crew: Writer, director: Tayarisha Poe. Editor: Kate Abernathy. Camera: Jomo Fray.
• With: Kiersey Clemons, Leon Bridges, Kelly Marie Tran, Michaela Watkins, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Judith Light, Aida Osman, Brandon Michael Hall, Connor Paolo, Lukita Maxwell, Aya Cash, Sandy Honig, Lovie Simone
• Music By: Terence Nance

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‘Marriage Story’ movie review: Love, life and heartbreak

Noah baumbach’s devastating new film is a searing portrait of a relationship ending.

Updated - December 16, 2019 05:13 pm IST

Published - December 16, 2019 04:56 pm IST

Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in ‘Marriage Story’

While not similar stories by any means, Marriage Story , much like Room (2015), is a film where thoughts and feelings are articulated so precisely that viewers know exactly what the characters are going through.

Directed by Academy Award-nominated director Noah Baumbach, the film has scored a host of Golden Globe nominations (usually a predictor of how the Oscars will go) including best drama motion picture, best screenplay, and best actor nominations for Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver who play Nicole and Charlie Barber, a couple in the process of getting a divorce.

He is a well-regarded “serious” New York theatre director; she is the lead actor in his theatre company, having had a starring role years earlier in a teen movie titled All Over the Girl.

The film opens with a montage as Charlie and Nicole detail what they love about each other (a note of positivity before things get contentious, says their therapist).

“He rarely gets defeated, which I feel I always do,” says Nicole. “My crazy ideas are her favourite things to figure out how to execute,” says Charlie. They both call the other competitive and praise the other’s skills in parenting their eight-year-old, Henry (Azhy Robertson).

Did Charlie cheat on Nicole, or is Nicole resentful because she gave up what could have been a movie star life to do theatre in New York?

• Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Azhy Robertson, Julie Hagerty, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta
• Director: Noah Baumbach
• Runtime: 2 hr 16 minutes
• Storyline : The breakdown of a marriage and its aftermath

The answers come through slowly.

Let’s do this without lawyers, they say in the beginning, aiming to protect their son during the transition and hoping to stay friends.

But as Nicole begins to step out of the large shadow her husband has cast, which starts with making the move to LA with Henry to film a pilot (it’s just temporary insists Charlie to himself and anyone who will listen), she begins to assert herself and what she wants from her life. And in this regard, she is aided by her tough-as-nails-but-sympathetic-to-her-cause lawyer played by Laura Dern (always excellent and also nominated for a Globe) .

But things do get contentious, especially after Charlie fires his old-school lawyer and hires his own bulldozing lawyer played by Ray Liotta. This eventually culminates in a truly-magnificently acted eruption of anger, frustration and resentment carried through the years of their marriage.

Jojo Rabbit hasn’t yet released in India so a comparison can’t be made but this is probably Scarlett’s best performance till date. From a woman who worries about what she is doing and how it affects Charlie and Henry to living life the way she wants to, every emotion is etched on her face. Driver too is excellent as someone who has his own suppressed resentments and who is trying to balance his career and ensure that his son does not slip away from him (children, obviously, do not understand the import of certain actions and sometimes just don’t want to do something. Even if their father flew 5000 miles to see them).

The poignant soundtrack by Randy Newman (also nominated for a Golden Globe) proves to be the perfect accompaniment to the story.

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English cinema

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The Fight Over the Next Pandemic

The deadline for a new international pandemic plan was last week. so far, negotiations have failed..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Today, at the height of the COVID pandemic, nearly 200 countries started negotiating a plan to ensure they did better when the next pandemic inevitably arrives. Their deadline for that plan was last week.

My colleague Apoorva Mandavilli explains why so far, those negotiations have failed.

It’s Thursday, June 6.

So, Apoorva, something that was supposed to happen and happen right now that I think most of us didn’t even was ever in the works hasn’t happened. And that’s a global plan for the next pandemic. So tell us this entire story.

Think back to 2021, the very worst days of COVID when we had thousands of people dying in the US and in the rest of the world. There was just so much confusion about whether to wear masks or not, whether to close schools. And it was very difficult to think what any country should do.

And so in the middle of that chaos and confusion —

The Eagle has landed.

Carrying the hopes of a country, the first shipment of coronavirus vaccines reach Australian skies.

— we did get the vaccines.

You’re watching right now history being made, one of the first people in the entire country right here to get dose number two of the Pfizer vaccine.

Then all of a sudden, there was this hope. But the thing is that those vaccines were really mostly available in the richer countries.

Parts of Asia and Latin America have recorded a spike in COVID fatalities amid medical supply and vaccine shortages.

Few people in Africa have been vaccinated. Some countries don’t have any vaccines at all.

So we in the United States and a lot of countries in the European Union and some of the other high and middle income countries had the vaccines.

Rich countries have enough doses to vaccinate everyone nearly three times over, whilst poor countries don’t have enough to even reach health workers and people at risk.

But elsewhere in the world, there were no vaccines really. It became obvious to some low and middle income countries that they were not going to do very well in this pandemic. There were all these advanced purchase orders from the richer countries. And they were having some very tough negotiations with pharma companies that were charging them more than they were charging the rich countries.

And by the end of that horrible, horrible year, more than 90 percent of people in the richer countries had had two doses of vaccine. But 2 percent of people in low income countries had had any vaccines. So that really just striking inequity made people realize this was just a mess. We did not know how to deal with the pandemic.

The time to act is now.

So in December 2021, by the end of this year of inequity —

We must not allow the memories of this crisis to fade and go back to business as usual.

— the World Health Organization brought together all the countries —

The impacts on our societies, economies, and health, especially for the poor and the most vulnerable, are too significant.

— and launched this process to come up with a playbook to really think about how all the countries of the world need to prevent and respond to the next pandemic and do it in a way that would protect everybody, rich and poor, across the world. And the WHO decided that this discussion could not be just an informal conversation between health ministers, that this needed to be an international treaty, a legally binding treaty so that every country has to take this very seriously and everybody agrees on how to do this next time.

Hmm. So at the very height of COVID’s awfulness, these countries in the WHO are saying, we know you all are very, very busy fighting this pandemic. It is taking up all your time and energy. But we need you to now start to think about how badly this is going and not just fight the current pandemic but start planning on a better way to fight the next one. That’s kind of a big ask.

It is a big ask, but what is the alternative? That we come to the next pandemic and have a repeat of all of the chaos and confusion we saw during COVID? So I think it was an acknowledgment that we needed it. We needed to come up with a plan. And it became obvious that part of that plan needed to be a way to repair the mistrust that had formed between low income countries and high income countries and that without repairing that, we just did not really stand a good chance of fighting the next pandemic.

Right. And, of course, the thing about a global pandemic is that any weak link, any country that’s not doing its part or getting what it needs, becomes a problem for every other country. That’s the nature of a pandemic. We need — we talked about this with you, we talked about this with our colleagues throughout the pandemic — a system where there’s a strong program and plan in every country so that the virus can be stamped out.

Exactly. I mean, in the United States, more people died because of variants than they did because of the original virus. And a lot of those variants started in countries that did not have access to vaccines.

OK, so what do these talks start to actually look like? And just how many countries end up being involved in them?

So all of the countries that are member states of the World Health Organization were involved in this. 194 countries.

And they all sent delegates to meet to draft something and then to discuss every aspect of it and try to come to a consensus. And the goal was to get that to a point where all the countries were ready to sign off on it by May 2024. They had meetings over a period of two and a half years to talk through this. Some sections they all agreed on pretty easily. You can imagine the general goals like, yes, we should have a good plan to fight a pandemic. Or yes, we should have good research on vaccines and drugs, things like that, the general sort of philosophical goals everybody agrees on.

Right. Principles are always the easiest thing to negotiate.

The easiest thing to negotiate. But then you start getting into how this happens, right? And it’s actually kind of interesting. In the draft, if you look at the drafts, they have areas that are green, which means everybody sort of agreed, and yellow, which means they’re starting to come to an agreement, their sort of general consensus, and then white, which means it’s really no agreement. They’re just not even on the same page. And when you look at what’s green across all of these drafts, the philosophical goal is green from the start, no problem.

The yellow started to come slowly, these areas of consensus, things like, for example, safety measures in the labs that work with dangerous viruses. And that’s not just because one of the theories about COVID is that the virus leaked from a lab. We know from long before COVID that lab safety is very important for making sure that those dangerous viruses don’t get out into the world. There is also agreement around how countries should do surveillance to see what outbreaks might be emerging. And some of that stuff is tricky.

Why is it tricky? I mean, isn’t there a pretty standard playbook for trying to detect a virus and what to do once you detect it?

Sure. But there are some things that are big sticking points like money. Not all countries have the resources to do the kind of surveillance that they need to do. And so who funds that? And then some countries have vested interests, like Argentina wouldn’t want any rules that forbid export of certain kinds of meat products because that’s a big part of their economy.

There are countries where live animal markets are a thing, and not just in China, which we’re all familiar with, is another origin theory for COVID. Lots of other countries rely on these markets. And they don’t want to have very strict rules about which animals can be held together and how densely packed they can or can’t be. So when you start to get into the details there, it is actually difficult to reach consensus on some of these things.

But they have made a lot of progress. And they have come to yellow and green on some important things like that every country should have a health care workforce trained to respond to a pandemic, that they should make best efforts to have local production of things like vaccines and drugs, and that they should provide all of these resources to their own citizens. Things like that, those are all under agreement. They’re all green now.

So what exactly is holding these negotiations back? What ends up being the biggest remaining conflict?

It won’t surprise you to hear, Michael, that the biggest conflict is exactly what all of this began with, which is the lack of access that low income countries have to things like vaccines.

There have been interesting proposals in the drafts and one in particular that would solve at least some of this issue. But it’s been very difficult to convince rich countries, middle income countries, and low income countries that that proposal would be of great benefit to everybody involved.

We’ll be right back. So, Apoorva, tell us about this particular proposal that could do a lot of work to solve the inequities at the center of these negotiations and why that proposal has created so much conflict.

The heart of the section that has really created the most conflict is whether low income countries get access to vaccines in a timely manner and at a cost that is affordable to them. And all the low income countries recognize that they don’t have a lot of bargaining power. They were treated pretty poorly by pharma companies during this past pandemic. And so they’ve been thinking about setting things up so that that does not happen again, that the next time around, they are not left behind.

Right. But like you said, they don’t have a lot of power to bargain.

They don’t. But there have been times when poor countries have come up with a way to make everybody else realize that they’re essential to this whole process. So let me give you an example of this that really, I think, illustrates how much everybody else needs the low income nations during an outbreak.

So in 2006, Indonesia was battling a bird flu outbreak. And they had been very dutifully sending samples of the virus that they had in their country to the World Health Organization labs to analyze. And that information helps pharma companies develop things like vaccines.

Or tests, right.

Or tests. And in this particular case, the Indonesian Health Ministry approached the World Health Organization to say, look, we’ve given you these samples. We have people dying in our country. And we need access to vaccines and drugs. And the WHO told them, sorry, we don’t directly distribute any of that. You have to talk to the manufacturers.

And this is where that leverage becomes really important because Indonesia did not actually have leverage with these pharma companies. And so the vaccine manufacturer told them that they would sell them vaccines but at commercial prices that that country cannot afford. And then a drug manufacturer told them that they did not have enough drugs to give Indonesia because richer countries had placed enough purchase orders that there was a delay of two years. So [LAUGHS]: Indonesia was so angry about all of this that they declined to share any more samples with the WHO.

So Indonesia basically says, we will never again make the mistake of promptly sharing information about a potentially deadly pathogen because we learned that we get nothing in return.

Right. And understanding that realization also has driven a lot of the conversation in the drafting of this treaty where low income countries have essentially said, we recognize that you need us to share these samples. But we are not going to do that unless you can promise to us that we will get some access to vaccines and drugs that you make based on the samples we give you. So we want something in return for the information we provide to you.

What is the specific proposal that comes from this realization?

Yeah, this proposal has created a lot of controversy, so there are versions of it. But the most recent one says essentially that if the low income countries share their samples with the WHO that pharma companies have to give the WHO 10 percent of the vaccines they make as a donation and then 10 percent either at a non-profit cost or just a deeply discounted rate also to the WHO. And then the WHO would distribute that 20 percent of vaccines that they get from the pharma companies to the countries that are in most need.

Hmm. So this proposal, which feels very innovative, is the ultimate manifestation of poor countries’ power in this dynamic. If they don’t get vaccines, then the big countries will never get the information about a virus that’s necessary for there to have ever been a vaccine. It’s really interesting.

It is. And this is the biggest chip that low income countries have. So they are not willing to budge on this. But guess who doesn’t like this? Pharmaceutical companies and the countries that really support the interests of the pharmaceutical companies. And that includes the United States, Germany, Switzerland, some of the big players, places where these companies are a big presence and a very powerful lobby.

What specifically have these pharmaceutical companies and the countries like the US that have so many of them said about this proposal?

So the countries, they are willing to give in principle and say that the pharmaceutical companies will voluntarily give some of the vaccines to the WHO, but they don’t want it mandated. Whereas the low income countries, they want it to be really codified so that there is no loophole. And the conversations have gone round and round on that one word, “voluntary.”

Apoorva, is it safe to assume that a country like the US, which, of course, has a booming and very profitable pharmaceutical industry, won’t sign on to these proposals unless that word “voluntary” is in the deal, that they cannot abide by one where it’s mandatory that these big pharmaceutical companies have to give up so much of their vaccine to poorer countries?

They are not going to say that in so many words, but yes. And the United States actually has come up with some very nice plans to help some of these low income countries set up infrastructure and be prepared for pandemics. But I think crossing pharmaceutical companies is not a place they will go.

Hmm. So is that really the only big obstacle left in these negotiations? Or is there anything else?

Oh, there’s lots more.

There has been so much misinformation and disinformation around this whole issue just like there has been about every aspect of COVID. And a lot of it centers around the hesitation and the opposition that many populist leaders have expressed. In the US, for example, there are Republican senators and governors who have come out against the treaty. And they say that this is a power grab by the WHO, that it is going to allow the director general of the WHO to tell the US what to do, whether to have mask mandates, whether to have vaccine mandates, none of which is true, by the way.

And in a bid to counter some of that misinformation, there is actually an explicit line in the treaty saying that the treaty respects the sovereignty of all the individual nations. They’ve tried to address that head on. But it hasn’t really made all of that chatter go away.

Mm-hmm. How much does this practically matter, the fact that a handful or perhaps more than a handful of Republicans in the US are skeptical of this and think ideologically speaking that it oversteps the bounds of what a treaty should do? I mean, ultimately, do they have any power over whether the US signs this treaty?

They do because delegates can agree to this treaty at the WHO, but everybody has to bring it back to their home countries. And in the US, the treaty then has to be approved for ratification by the Senate. You have to have a two thirds majority in the Senate say, yes, we agree to this treaty. So if you have a number of Republican senators who are absolutely opposed to it, it may not pass.

Mm. So it very much feels like so many of the issues that made everyone think this treaty was necessary, inequities between rich countries and poor countries and misinformation and ideological skepticism of how to handle a pandemic to begin with that really defined COVID for us, that those forces are now making it very hard for this treaty to actually be reached. They never really went away.

They never went away. It felt like there was about five seconds when everyone was united in thinking that we needed something different, and there was a lot of goodwill. But a lot of that has evaporated. And we’re getting very quickly to a point where people have forgotten what COVID looked like and felt like and what the devastation was like and have gone back to old positions on we don’t want to share. We don’t want to give anything away. Everything for us first. All of the thinking that led to the problems during COVID.

So what realistically happens now? And do you based on your reporting think that this treaty has any real chance of being completed and passed by the 194 countries involved in it?

Well, the draft was supposed to be finalized at the meeting last week of the World Health Assembly. And that didn’t happen. But they did set a deadline to say that the negotiations will continue. And then they’ll hope to have something done by next year’s meeting.

But there’s just so much in flux right now. There are elections all over the world. Who knows what Donald Trump will do if he gets elected? We know that he withdrew from the WHO the last time around. And he has even said that he may shut down the pandemic preparedness office in the White House. So he’s not particularly invested in this whole topic, this whole issue.

And in the meantime, we already have so many threats that are really picking up. For global health experts and for reporters like myself who watch all this stuff, it’s a bit alarming that we now have bird flu right here in the United States. And the next pandemic, pretty much every expert I talk to agrees it’s not a question of if, but when. And if we had had this treaty ready, if we can ever have this treaty ready, we would be so much better prepared for something like that to happen. But it just doesn’t seem all that likely right now.

Well, Apoorva, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. In a last minute about face, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she would block a long awaited tolling plan known as congestion pricing that was set to begin at the end of the month. The program, the first of its kind in the US, would have charged as much as $15 for cars entering the busiest parts of Manhattan. The goal was to alleviate traffic, reduce pollution, and raise money for the city’s aging subway system. But Hochul argued that the tolls threatened the city’s fragile economic recovery after the pandemic.

And on Thursday, former romantic partners of Hunter Biden, the president’s son, testified in a Delaware courtroom about the depths of his drug addiction and the toll that it took on them. The testimony, including how much Hunter Biden spent on drugs and the type of drugs he used, was designed to establish that he was a chronic drug abuser who lied when he claimed to be sober on an application for a handgun in 2018.

Today’s episode was produced by Alex Stern, Carlos Prieto, and Stella Tan with help from Will Reid and Rikki Novetsky. It was edited by Lexie Diao and Devon Taylor, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

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Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Apoorva Mandavilli

Produced by Alex Stern ,  Carlos Prieto ,  Stella Tan ,  Will Reid and Rikki Novetsky

Edited by Lexie Diao and Devon Taylor

Original music by Marion Lozano and Pat McCusker

Engineered by Chris Wood

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At the height of the Covid pandemic, nearly 200 countries started negotiating a plan to ensure they would do better when the next pandemic inevitably arrived. Their deadline for that plan was last week.

Apoorva Mandavilli, a science and global health reporter for The Times, explains why, so far, the negotiations have failed.

On today’s episode

Apoorva Mandavilli , a science and global health reporter for The New York Times.

Background reading

Countries failed to agree on a treaty to prepare the world for the next pandemic before a major international meeting.

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Apoorva Mandavilli is a reporter focused on science and global health. She was a part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the pandemic. More about Apoorva Mandavilli

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