Soundtracking: Marriage Story
Wednesday, December 11, 2019 at 9:00AM by Chris Feil
Noah Baumbach opens Marriage Story with the beginning thrums of Randy Newman’s fairy tale score set against a duet between its divorcing couple. As they list their affections, it’s almost like they could break into song. And eventually they will, but not until they are ready. Scarlett Johansson’s Nicole and Adam Driver’s Charlie won’t sing until they have been given the back-breaking gift of clarity, the kind of new beginning you can’t really get until the old you is burnt to the ground. Marriage Story presents their new outlook by making fresh use of two songs from one famous musical with its own musings on love and marriage, Stephen Sondheim’s Company.
The unique achievement here is that Baumbach takes an already hallowed musical text and successfully repurposes it in a very different context. Company was about a man avoiding marriage, this is about ending one - both have a subtextual weight that is all about self-discovery, or self-awakening. But Baumbach allows them to imprint their own lives onto the already text-encumbered songs, much as we at home do with our original cast recordings. It’s a bookend of sorts, where they find their voices as they look into their future. Discourse abounds regarding who the film favors, and their two Sondheim songs allow as much room for perspective and interpretation on that front as anything else in the film. For this viewer, it’s as enthusiastic for Nicole’s new beginning as it is gracious towards Charlie’s.
Nicole performs “You Could Drive A Person Crazy” with her mother and sister, without preamble for the audience as if it was already fully formed act. In context of the musical it’s a number that, despite the frustrations expressed within, is still somewhat channeled through its protagonist Bobby’s perception of three female lover. However this is Nicole living in her own image. The number gets to function as it originally does as an unpacking of male bullshit, but Nicole feels freer here than to be performing this as some wink towards Charlie specifically. Instead, for the first time we’re getting to see her simply enjoy her life as it fulfills her. She’s part of a joyous and harmonious family unit, but the focus is on her. It looks like the enactment of everything she confessed needing in her tearful first monologue to Laura Dern’s lawyer. Most importantly, the film feels like its celebrating that she moving towards what she envisioned for herself.
Meanwhile, Charlie kind of stumbles into the Company’s thesis number “Being Alive”, a profound contemplation on the human need to connect. In an impromptu act of goofing around, he starts aping the underscore dialogue before stumbling into an earnest performance of the soul-baring song. It’s as if it snags at his own circumstance, revealing a potential to speak to an immature but human compulsion for ego-stroking and being served by another. Where maintaining pitch barely mattered for the breezy performance of Nicole’s, more flashes of self-awareness hit as he strains for notes. But Driver’s quietly fragile performance of the song plays like an admission of his shortcomings, as if now that he is on the other side of the fallout, he begins to see where Nicole had been right. He’s humbled and raw, now beginning the kind of self-assessing journey Nicole had when the bottom fell out, and Baumbach wisely lets Driver sell this subtle interior crisis.
Part of Marriage Story’s wisdom is how it knows that regardless of things like blame or fault, both of its protagonists are on similar journeys of realizing things about themselves that demand change, but at different times. It's not about favoring one person's side or the other, but a conscious attempt at the big picture (like marriage, sometimes the effort is success enough, and maybe sometimes not). But where Company ends at the close of "Being Alive", Marriage Story briefly continues, as if to promise that Charlie can find the peace that Nicole has. The film's eleven o'clock number is the letter from the beginning, reminding us that even though they fell apart, there was always some music between them.
All Soundtracking installments can be found here!
Reader Comments (5)
Shoutout to the amazing Raúl Esparza singing Being Alive.
It tortures me how many people do not know about Company or those songs before seeing this movie. Heck, they would not know Sondheim.
I co-sign to everything. On "Late Night with Seth Meyers," Adam Driver off-handedly mentions that Noah Baumbach and he had considered making a movie of "Company." I hope they make it happen!
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