Marriage Story - Inevitable Balance
Thoughts On: Marriage Story (2019)
A theatre director and an actress attempt to manage a divorce and take care of their child.
A brilliant film about the sum of relationships and the fact that everything resolves itself in time and with pain. A relationship is not over until all debts are paid in full. The film gives us a picture of a marriage a man was winning in, and a divorce he must sacrifice in; a marriage a woman sacrificed for, and a divorce she wins. It breaks this basic picture down into the human motivations colliding under the marriage, demonstrating how even a high functioning couple can have their relationship deteriorate over the accumulation of minor betrayal and miscommunication. Their main cathartic argument outlining this is gold and so palpably human with some tremendous writing bolstering scintillatingly realistic and unglamourous performances from Driver and Johansson. My favourite aspect of the film is the tension between the lawyers and couple as they divorce. The lawyers are always of the opinion that this is just a time that will be over; and they are right, the divorce period is an intense but finite period in which the task of negotiation pulls the worst out of the couple and defines their separation. But, for the couple, the divorce is a destructive time that sets a new balance; it is less that they want this period to be over, but that they anticipate their relationship continuing beyond it and are trying to traverse the task of divorce, yet are faced with balancing and resolving the destructive nature of it. In realising that they both want to sustain a relationship beyond their marriage, they come to accept that the divorce must balance against the marriage; and what one gained, the other must lose, and what the other lost they will gain. And in such, the couple end up relocating as she always wanted. And such is the great melancholy of the film; the couple break up over an argument of where they will live and how they will work only to resolve it and learn to live alternatively in their divorce. Whilst the man has his way in marriage, he loses it alongside his company and family as a result when it breaks down. He submits and becomes the husband his wife wanted after the divorce and ruin of his previous life, only to find himself alone and her with another guy and new life; his punishment for not growing fast enough in the direction he committed to. And such says enough about marriage in my eyes; don't commit unless you can go all the ways it demands you to as you will be taken there kicking and screaming and having been robbed anyways if you do not go on your own violation.
