This awards season has been a curious one. Thanks to Netflix, a handful of heavy contenders were made widely available when, in other years, you'd expect them to be stuck in limited release until late January. Oscar obsessives and film enthusiasts around the world were able to enter a conversation that's usually exclusive to critics and cinephiles from New York and LA. This democratization of film discussion is wonderful, but along with it came some of the internet's worst impulses. I'm talking about memes.
Specifically, I'm talking about the meme-ification of Marriage Story's climactic fight, a moment that made me relieve some of the worst parts of my life…
The scene comes late in Noah Baumbach's semi-autobiographical drama after many other small skirmishes have been fought in the war of broken matrimony. Still, nothing like this has come to pass. You can feel the tension growing throughout the previous arguments, but, earlier, both partners hold back. They didn't point out hypocrisies when they could and reserved tears for solitude. Now, they don't hold back, both going for blood and saying things they shouldn't. Worse, they can't stop themselves. To love someone is to give them the weapon of your destruction and hope against hope that they'll never use it. They use it.
Charlie and Nicole fire ammo made out of intimate insecurities and open a Pandora's box that can never be closed. These things can't be unsaid and there's horror in their eyes when they realize the mutual violation. In particular, when Charlie speaks of wishing Nicole's death, a line is crossed; it's as if they're both paralyzed with shock. He cries, she tears up and ends up consoling the man who just wished her dead. In the miasma of love and hate in which they live, such contradicting gestures live in logical harmony. However, if watched in isolation, it may ring false and read like overacting.
These scenes are not meant to be consumed as short clips. The former couple screams and a wall is punched but, in context, it works as an exhausted coda to a symphony in constant crescendo. Even discounting the rest of the narrative, the fight scene starts with rigid postures and uneasy smiles, with condescending expressions instead of shouting matches. It's fascinating to see how the difference in each characters' limits through the fine modulation of the two performances. Their escalation of hurt feelings is walked at different paces and only at the end do they coexist in the same place of bruised hearts and despair.
Such a careful dance of emotional warmongering is difficult to do without maudlin hysterics getting in the way. It's a testament to Baumbach, Johansson and Driver's virtuosity that such fate is avoided. This fight is real and lived in.
While I've never been married, I've been in a long-term relationship that fell apart and involved many conflicts similar to those in Marriage Story. To watch the film a few weeks after the end of that love affair was like being hit in the chest with echoes of past traumas and anxieties. I've cried each of the five times I've watched the film and it doesn't get less hurtful with repeat viewings. The details strike a chord, like the dismissal of Nicole's feelings, the insincerity, the disrespect when moving through the house, the cursing, up to the the infantile begging for comfort at the finale. The way old resentments explode like a bomb full of nails is genuine. I feel a whiff of invalidation every time someone makes fun of the fight scene as if it's a bad melodrama, a ridiculous thing that doesn't happen in life. But anyone in a failed relationship will know that it does.
Do you see uncomfortable reflections of past relationships in Marriage Story?