Marriage Story

If Noah Baumbach movies have always been driven by dialogue, dating all the way back to his first, “Kicking and Screaming” (1995), he began, as many 90s indie filmmaker did, firmly of the Point-and-Shoot school. Gradually, however, with each successive film, he has ameliorated marrying his words to the film’s visuals, peaking with “Mistress America” (2015), where the dynamic language, co-written with Greta Gerwig, was not simply captured by the camera but seemed to carry the camera in its wake. And in “Marriage Story”, the blistering, oft-revealing nature of Baumbach’s conversations, charting the devastating spiral of a union, are only augmented by Baumbach’s visual command.

“Marriage Story” opens with a pair of montages and monologues in lockstep as we see and hear Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) Barber, darlings of the NYC theatre world, revel in the myriad details they love about their respective spouse. As loving as they are, though, cracks emerge, where, over different games of Monopoly, Charlie sees Nicole as overly competitive and Nicole sees Charlie as overly competitive. If this plays humorously, it’s Baumbach foreshadowing his intent to emphasize and question perspective. A few scenes later, in fact, we realize these voiceovers were culled from a couples therapy exercise in which they ultimately decline to participate. The thoughts are not imaginary, just left unsaid, illustrating how in a movie full of words their marriage is backsliding from words not spoken.

With their union established as already existing on the rocks, Nicole, an actress, leaves their home in New York and returns to Los Angeles, where’s she from, to star in a TV pilot, taking their son Henry (Azhy Roberston). If this sets up a bicoastal showdown between cosmopolitan elites, Baumbach has the courtesy to call attention to and skewer this, as he does in a courtroom scene where after a marital autopsy is metaphorically performed the Judge wryly notes there are a lot more couples waiting to have their say. Translation: you ain’t special! It’s funny, and Baumbach, as ever, excels at uproarious comedy amidst piercing truth, like a screwball scene in which Nicole, her mother (Julie Hagerty), and her sister (Merritt Weaver) hatch a plan to serve Charlie divorce papers. It’s not just Weaver’s comically awkward delivery of the papers but how the envelope bearing them goes unnoticed by Charlie twice, evoking how he can’t quite ever see what’s right in front of him and doesn’t notice it until it’s too late.

Indeed, in this scene, set in the kitchen, Charlie enters after having just arrived from the airport and immediately goes to the refrigerator, helping himself to leftover chicken. It suggests a familial intimacy at odds with the fissures of his own relationship, how someone can be so close yet simultaneously so far apart. And the double paradox becomes how in drawing apart, the process of divorce draws Charlie and Nicole closer, an idea Baumbach underlines in their many conversations – nay, arguments. Baumbach and his magnificent editor Jennifer Lame frequently start these wars of words in long or medium shots with more time between cuts until, as the dialogue grows more heated, the shots draw closer and the cuts quicker, like geysers rumbling until they erupt. And if the words are, as they often are with Baumbach, very written, these characters, given their roles in the theatre world, are accustomed to words and each fluent, cruel back and forth has the ring not of observations suddenly coming to them but long rehearsed.

If they have command of the words of their own arguments, when it comes to legalese, they are ignorant, meaning that in the big courtroom tête-à-tête they don’t say anything at all. Then again, the words spoken by their lawyers are just as often their own, each attorney drawing on a wealth of seemingly innocent moments leading up to it, fleeting moments and observations of a relationship repurposed as evidence, while Lame’s edits ensure we understand Nicole and Charlie are not just the emotionally injured parties but the focus, the facilitators. The scene presents divorce as wholly bereft of the idealistic empathy that Charlie’s initial attorney, Bert (Alan Alda), effuses, eventually forcing Charlie to enlist Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta) instead, a performance earning the hoary adjective bulldog because of Liotta’s persistent attack stance, verbally and physically. Yet if these two male lawyers represent different sides of the coin, Nicole’s attorney, Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), splits the difference, as cutthroat as she is compassionate, embodied in the sharpness of those high heels she kicks off to sit side-by-side with Nicole on the couch, professional self surrendering to personal. As Nora notes in a ferocious monologue, the divorce system might be set up to break you, but so is the system itself set up to break woman. “I represented Tom Petty’s wife in the divorce,” she says. “I got her one-half of that song.”

Nora, in other words, is helping Nicole get her part of the song, glimpsed in an incredible monologue where the camera never breaks with her character as she moves from the Nora’s sofa as therapist’s couch to the bathroom and back again, Johansson’s subtle vocal inflections demonstrating a dawning self-possession. And if “Marriage Story” is all about duality, then as Nicole is coming into her own, Charlie is losing sense of himself, or perhaps just coming to figure out who he was all along. That is brought home in Driver’s textured performance of confusion and pain improbably manifesting the old chestnut about one’s life slipping away, never more than when, suffering through a loquacious joke told by Bert, the panic of the whole damn deal palpably blooms on his face.

This scene occurs when Bert asks for a private chat with his client in the midst of divorce negotiations. Yet there is no similar scene that takes place between Nicole and Nora on the other side of the wall. That’s because even if “Marriage Story” alternates points-of-view it refrains from simply pogoing back and forth, like chapters in book, preferring to drift along with one character for awhile and then with another, not choosing sides but switching between them, eliciting the impression that this process could wind its way into eternity if not for a climactic sequence where Baumbach deftly transforms cringe-inducing comedy into nothing less than a metaphorical bloodletting giving way to the natural truth that even if a bond is broken the beat goes on.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

The core problem “The Meyerowitz Stories” chronicles concerns, as it occasionally has throughout the canon of writer/director Noah Baumbach, the patriarchy. In this case the culprit is Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman), a New York sculptor whose success likely lies as much in his mind as in the actual physical evidence, and whose ego and insecurity trickled down to his three children, all of which are recounted here in stories separated on screen by unflashy title cards suggesting something less than the fussy exactness of a Wes Anderson fairytale than a book of short stories with only one copy for sale at some independent bookstore no one goes to. The examinations of the sons Danny (Adam Sandler) and Matthew (Ben Stiller), who returns to New York from his west coast home, are ordered first and second and both much longer than the chapter devoted to Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) who only gets a monologue. Yet that is also just right. If she is, as she says, still as screwed up as them, she has nevertheless made a hard peace with it, while they continue flailing around, unable to put a finger on what ails them, even if that cure seems to be drifting just underneath the surrounding omnipresent noise.

You see this acutely in the movie’s opening scene. Baumbach does not so much graciously invite us into “The Meyerowitz Stories” as just unceremoniously drop us right into the midst of it, with Danny in his car, trying to find a place to park and shouting at the car tailing him. This stridency is only amplified by the ongoing conversation with his daughter, Eliza (Grace Van Patten), in the driver’s seat, not to mention Lisa Lisa & The Cult Jam’s “Head to Toe” blaring from the radio. Lord, it’s a lot to suddenly adjust to. And yet, if you pay attention to the sweet, easy way this father & daughter converse, how they find common ground in the music, you can sense the impressive stability of their relationship pulsing even amidst the cacophony.

Indeed, the characters don’t really talk to each other in “The Meyerowitz Stories” as much as talk around and over one another, or only to themselves. A scene at a hospital where Danny and Matthew walk and talk, the camera following them into an elevator and back out, is a virtual symphony of sidesplitting non-communicative communication as Danny badgers Matthew with follow-up questions that suggest he never heard what Matthew said in the first place. Great lines just sort of oddly emerge in the middle of otherwise serious discussions, like Harold deflecting Danny’s line of questioning about why he’d sell their family townhome by turning his attention to the Mets game on TV – “Cabrera just grounded into a double play” – that is richly evocative of how the character operates on a wavelength apart from everyone else and that no one can quite tap into.

Baumbach, working in concert with editor Jennifer Lame, underscores all this confusion with myriad curt cuts. He not only hurls you into scenes unprepared, he yanks you out of scenes, over and over, before they even feel as if they have finished, like a confrontation Matthew and Harold have with a couple tourists the latter suspects of swiping his coat. It builds to a kind of comical release, but before that release arrives, the movie cuts to the next scene, leaving you to wonder what happened and putting you in the headspace of these brothers who still have questions they want answered. This confliction is evident in the performances too, with both Stiller and Sandler oscillating between kindness and aggression. A late scene where they fight deftly evokes this idea, a transition from niceties to wimpy punches as chaotic as it is natural.

That sequence occurs at an event intended to honor Harold, where each brother gives a speech, focusing on their dad, one right after the other. And while both speeches kind of go belly-up, it never feels forced, particularly Danny’s, which might be Sandler’s best onscreen moment to date, where he channels all the anxiety and accidental generosity he has ever evinced in any of his other good performances into a heartfelt awkwardness that rings true. These moments are also intended to bring Danny and Matthew a certain kind of closure with their father, though why I will refrain from saying, except that Baumbach doesn’t quite stop there, even though it feels like the movie might, and keeps rolling, as if casting off closure as some kind of myth, forcing these characters to keep rolling with their newfound feelings.

The most interesting scene at this event is when a young woman approaches Matthew, asks if he is Harold’s son, and proceeds to explain what an influence Harold had her, casting art that Matthew had hated, that others had sort of scoffed at, as something meaningful. It’s evocative of all The Meyerowitz Stories, how they appear to say one thing, except that seen from another angle they appear to say something else, and how so often the tools of progress can only be seized upon when caught in just the right light.

Mistress America

The American Dream, that anciently glorious idiom, presumes that any one person in this vast nation is entitled to transforming into whoever they want to be and striking it big. The individualism inherent in this notion is what makes it entirely apropos that the American Dream in director Noah Baumbach’s masterpiece “Mistress America” takes root in Brooke Cardenas (Greta Gerwig), a narcissist stricken by the willful delusion that because you say something that automatically means it is. (“That’s why I’m not in therapy. I know everything about myself.”)

Baumbach has always leaned on dyspeptic egotists, from Ben Stiller’s Greenberg to Nicole Kidman’s Margot, but Brooke is in a league all her own. There is an early scene where a former high school classmate confronts Brooke over her cold, cold heart. It’s familiar, the moment when we are made to understand Brooke has always been like this. But rather than simply letting this revelation lie there, Baumbach and Gerwig (who wrote the screenplay together), turn it around, forcing Brooke to forgo self-actualization and act as if she’s the victim. It’s like putting the character’s last shred of potential empathy on the pyre. It’s like she’s “All About Eve’s” Marilyn Monroe crossed with Bette Davis; miraculously innocent in her cruelty.

As the film opens, Tracy (Lola Kirke) has just gone away to Barnard College. A la “Frances Ha”, Baumbach constructs these scenes as a fast-moving series of vignettes, effectively demonstrating the alacrity with which a freshman can be overwhelmed when her utopian ideals of the collegiate experience crumble in the face of the real thing. Adrift and friendless for what in teenage years feels like months, her mother Stevie (Kathryn Erbe) suggests she contact Brooke, the thirtysomething daughter of Stevie’s fiancé.

Though Brooke is intentionally unlikable, Gerwig’s genuine marvel of a performance is not, often playing like she’s only in the room with herself, listening only in so much as she’s thinking of what she can say next, yet still tuning into her semi-protégé’s frequency just not enough to acutely convey that she understands Tracy just as far as Tracy wants to be understood. You may see right through Brooke’s obvious veneer, but you also see how initially Tracy does not, swept away in Brooke’s almost bullish charisma that Gerwig so ably captures, amplified by the quick-cut whoosh of filmmaking, as if it’s all happening so fast Tracy never has time to stop and consider her mentor’s cosmopolitan aura is just a put-on.

Brooke relentlessly concocts plans and schemes, none of which amount anything tangible, emblemized by her Greek boyfriend we never see. He’s funding her latest harebrained capitalist reverie, a restaurant called Mom’s, not as much an eatery as a community center with food, a cultural Shangri-La. She talks it up likes it’s the best place in the world, less concerned with brass tacks than the ivory tower at the end of the rainbow; that’s why she lives in Times Square, right off Broadway, consumed by a land of make believe.

Eventually Tracy seizes on Brooke as a creative invention in a story that could gain her entrance to the snobbish literary society in which she wants so desperately. And if art is a working through then Tracy uses this short story to work through Brooke, to see both sides of her potential stepsister, allowing the film to strike an incredible juxtaposition, seeing something extremely earnest in the ersatz, a complexly poignant admiration for the way this faux-socialite leverages everything on her dreams.

Those dreams are brought to the edge in the film’s lengthiest and most virtuoso sequence, one in which Baumbach acutely maintains a firm and humorous visual handle on a multitude of mobile characters, triggered when the necessary funding for Mom’s goes belly up which transforms “Mistress America” into a drawing room farce as Brooke and Tracy and journey north to the wealthy hamlet of Greenwich, Connecticut to visit Brooke’s old flame, Dylan (Michael Chernus) now married to an ice princess, Mamie Claire (Heather Lind), guilty of stealing Brooke’s long-ago brilliant t-shirt idea, and convince them to invest in Mom’s.

To make her pitch, Dylan forces Brooke to ascend his “media stage”, like it’s a makeshift infomercial, a laugh-out-loud reminder that the American Dream has been transformed from a goal you pursue to a brand you pitch while hoping that the precious few with money to burn will actually back it. And even as Brooke rises to the occasion, her desperation comes through loud and clear, and her moment of triumph doubles as the moment she realizes all her grand planning is just playing pretend.

“Mistress America” is built off screwball comedies of the past, loaded with brisk action and manically witty repartee and infused with insightful, hilarious and caustic social commentary relevant to the present. Yet just as much it comes to resemble a zanier update of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterwork, “The Great Gatsby”, imagining Tracy and Brooke as a modernistic feminine spin on Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. What is Brooke, after all, if not a self-made star-gazer, a larger-than-life fabrication, one as easy to dismiss as to admire. Her incessant vaingloriousness is all in the name of chowing down on that pie in American airspace, a ridiculous belief in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes her throughout “Mistress America”, sure, but that’s no matter—tomorrow she will run faster, stretch out her arms farther.

The American Dream probably was never much more than a huckster’s slogan to begin with considering that F. Scott was taking it apart way back in 1925. Yet its myth survives because for so much cynicism inundating culture we nonetheless remain inherently romantic, the dueling notions at play in Brooke. She is introduced descending the staircase at the TKTS stand in Times Square, arms spread wide to greet Tracy, exclaiming in the manner of a New World tour guide “Welcome to the great white way!” Alas, she’s misjudged the number of stairs and with several still to go is forced to wobbly maintain her starlet facade. And she does. She never relents; she never gives up on the persona; she will grin and bear it in the face of all obstacles. And in that moment, in Gerwig’s immaculate visage, we see The American Dream itself laid bare. She’s wholly sincere; she’s also full of shit.

While We're Young

Middle age has crept up on Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts). Suddenly years have passed in the wake of a momentous event and they don't even notice. One month’s planning now qualifies as “spontaneous”. They are resting beneath the warm blanket of routine, completely settled yet emotionally adrift. They both work in the field of documentary films, observing other lives while casually avoiding their own. At first they seem like a more highbrow, childless version of the couple in last year’s “Neighbors” forced to take evasive emotional maneuvers when a frat moves in next door. “While We’re Young”, however, goes beyond a crisis of aging to examine an aging (aged) man grappling with failure.

The obligatory bomb of Josh and Cornelia’s lives arrives in the form of Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a pair of married go-with-the-flow twenty somethings that prefer vinyl, hawk avocado ice cream and prefer bikes as their primary mode of transportation. I imagine they must be most of Middle America's idea of what constitutes every Brooklyn resident. Jamie introduces himself to Josh, claiming to have tracked down the latter’s hard-to-find filmmaking masterwork on VHS, immediately currying favor.

That, of course, is just the sort of reinforcement Josh needs. He is in the midst of an eight year odyssey to finish a documentary with a pitch so convoluted that every time he tries making it he simply spouts catchphrases in a circular maze of logic leading back to that one place where I imagine every single pitch meeting for a new HBO show ends..... “It’s about America.” In no time, Jamie is picking Josh’s brain and enlisting his and Cornelia’s help in helming his own film, one that purports to make Facebook “real”.

For a good chunk of “While We're Young” it seems as if writer/director Noah Baumbach – highfalutin’ Noah Baumbach – is settling his trademark sour intelligentsia into something approaching the outer limits of mainstream, broad(ish) comedy and set pieces. He puts Josh in a trilby to match Jamie’s which is vintage Hollywood clothes-as-character-behavioral-shift. He sends Cornelia off to hip-hop dancing classes where she shakes her booty (hysterically) with people of younger ages. They go on a spa retreat where they are induced to vomit up their emotional toxins. You wonder where all this is headed. It can’t be headed toward the painfully obvious conclusion of old people imparting their wisdom even as they re-connect with what it means to be young.

No one would confuse Baumbach as being master of cinematic long con. Typically his narratives, for all their conversational detours and moments where “nothing” “happens”, are on the straight and narrow. “Kicking and Screaming” flashed between future and present but trended toward a foregone conclusion. “Frances Ha” had all manner of flights of fancy but sustained the emotionally spastic arc of a struggling young adult. “While We’re Young”, however, reveals Josh's youthful elixir as a mere hoax by employing the trope of any number of standard-issue thrillers where a seemingly innocuous bit of story fluff is revealed as the vital clue that suddenly sends our protagonist’s mind spinning back through the entire story. It's a crazy tonal shift that works specifically because one of the phoniest instruments of “movie magic” is made to arouse questions of authenticity.

That Josh is a documentarian is no accident. This is the vessel by which he was and is determined to carve out some kind of truth about the world and about himself. But if all he has to show for it is a nebulous eight-years-and-counting mess that says nothing he can actually articulate than what does he really have? “The essence of art,” Michael Murphy said in “Manhattan”, “is to provide a kind of working-through”, and Josh has inadvertently used his art to work through himself and find that he's more or less amounted to nothing. Like so many Baumbach characters before him he runs headfirst into his own failings.

It is perhaps too easy yet nevertheless irresistible to view “While We’re Young” as Baumbach taking stock of his own place in life. After all, the period between his second and third feature films was exactly……eight years. And so perhaps that is why the film concludes with a tinge of hope rather than despair. Even so, it’s a cautious hope, letting it hang in the air, standing in the middle of the sunny and the dark side of the street. “While We’re Young” isn't so much a film about getting old as Josh coming to grips with what he has become. Hope becomes disappointment. And then it gave way to hope again. It’s the life crisis cycle.

Frances Ha

Midway through director Noah Baumbach's latest ode to early-to-mid life angst our heroine Frances (Greta Gerwig) has gone home for Christmas and/or to briefly stay with her parents in Sacramento. It is shot, as is the rest of the film, in that French New Wave style (it is also in black and white) littered with quick cuts. This gives the impression that the film is - as in, life - going by much too quickly, but this Sacramento sequence really goes by fast. It goes so fast that you barely have time to register who was who or what was happening. The faces of her parents barely linger in my mind. The holiday lights are strung up, things happen, the holiday lights are struck, and Frances is on an escalator at the airport. This is how I feel every Christmas when I go home - gone with an escalator ride at the airport.

But this sequence you hardly remember actually contains the film's most critical line, a line which threatens to skip right on by, a self-help ship passing in the night. Frances, as characters in stasis are wont to do, lays in the tub. Her mother batters the door. She needs to get in. Frances rebuffs her attempts. Finally, her mother cries: "How long is it going to take?"

I have been a fairly studious Greta Gerwig fan ever since I took the Mumblecore plunge, the talky, low-budget genre wherein Gerwig got her start before branching off into the pseudo-mainstream. Even if her films have not always worked for me, her performances, generally daring and quirkily inventive, have left me impressed. (In particular, her portrayal of an untraditional mental breakdown in last year's "The Dish and the Spoon.") Still, I often found myself wondering, how long would it take for Gerwig to find the perfect role that specifically employed her unique off-centeredness as an actress - mannerisms, scattered line readings, cheekiness - to fully inform the character she was playing?

Well, as is the tragic case in Hollywood, or off-Hollywood (?), often females have to take upon themselves to author that character. So Gerwig teamed with her significant other, Baumbach, to imagine Frances, 27 years old, so poor she cannot afford to live in Tribeca (egads!), couch-surfing, apprenticing as a dancer, which is what she wants to "do". Except the film, both delicately and obviously, hints that this dream is down to last its embers.

Gerwig is a little wonky, immature and uncertain, drifting, perhaps dangerously, but without comprehension (or the urge?) of how to find resolve. She and her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner), adorned with oversized glasses that don't suggest a hipster as much as an adolescent by way of an adult, still seem to reside in a make-believe world of sleepovers and girl talk even as Sophie drifts toward possible marriage with a baseball cap wearing bro.

That last one is key. Sophie has someone, Frances does not. In fact, Frances and one of her part-time roommates - who is writing a spec screenplay for "Gremlins 3" - deem her "undatable." She seems okay with it. This does not, gratefully, turn into Frances needing to find a man to become a woman. In a way, it is not even about Frances becoming a woman - rather, her character trajectory is more like chicken scratches than a classical arc.

I have been a fairly studious Noah Baumbach fan ever since a few of my best friends introduced me to his "Kicking and Screaming" and I fell smack-dab into its cult, incessantly quoting it to anyone who cares (or does not) to listen. I have, more or less, enjoyed all his films, and yet in all his films - even in the sound "Squid and the Whale" - you could sense him struggling to put it all together. I wondered, how long will it take? Will it ever happen?

Here, at last, it does, exhibiting a focus and tightness absent in his other work but still coming across so airy and free-wheeling. The quick cuts never play as artifice, more as the miscellaneous pieces of a life puzzle, one which Frances struggles mightily to put together. A side trip to Paris that is as hilarious as it is sad (which is the movie as a whole) employs the mandatory shot of The Eiffel Tower to excellent effect. Frances tries to light a cigarette. It just won't take. Angered she pushes off the rail she has been leaning against and walks away, revealing that infamous iron lattice tower behind, as if her back is turned to what is typical.

Frances is atypical, even if this whole early midlife crisis is not. The overarching argument, however, is not that Frances needs to find herself, but find her way in life. Her core temperature, so to speak, is intact, and she needs to find her bearings. Any bearings, any bearings at all.

The last shot is strangely, sweetly perfect. I will not reveal it but it seems to suggest she has not completely owned who she is yet. She remains a work in progress. Aren't we all?