Marriage Story: Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in nasty divorce

Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to the exceptional The Meyerowitz Stories is a quiet gem.

Laura Dern, left, and Scarlett Johansson in Marriage Story.

My selection for the best American film of 2017, Noah Baumbach’s bitter comedy about the New York art world, The Meyerowitz Stories, bypassed cinemas to screen exclusively on Netflix. Baumbach’s follow-up is also a Netflix Original, but it’s getting a short window in cinemas before it starts streaming, and it’s highly recommended.

Directly quoting Ingmar Bergman’s great film about marriage and divorce, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Baumbach’s dramatic comedy is about a couple who have been married for 10 years and love one another, but find that, for one reason or another, they can’t continue to live together.

Charlie (Adam Driver) is a fringe theatre director who has lived all his life in New York. For him, the Big Apple is the centre of the artistic world, and he assumes any sensible person will share his view. His wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), an actress, was born and raised in Los Angeles; she loves working in New York and she loves Charlie and their eight-year-old son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), but when an offer to act in the pilot of a TV series being filmed in LA comes up she hardly hesitates.

Marriage Story opens with a brisk montage of scenes in which we see Charlie from Nicole’s perspective, and vice versa. This sequence, which later proves to be illustrations of the depositions each one has been ordered to write citing the other’s strengths and weaknesses, is deeply revealing. Nicole listens, really listens, to Charlie’s stories and Charlie is a warm and loving father to Henry. He’s a great dresser, he cries during sad movies (but never watches television) while she gives just the right gifts. He loves it when she cuts his hair but he’s a bit exasperated when she leaves mugs with tea bags still in them around their apartment. She’s tidy (apart from that annoying thing with the tea) and he’s not. These foolish things, and many others, are illustrated with affection and make it clear that this couple are still in love, which makes the sad reality of the divorce they’re negotiating all that more poignant.

The problem seems to be that Nicole has, until now, been content to live in Charlie’s orbit. She had a brief success in a movie before they met, married, and moved — since then she’s been acting in the experimental theatre produced by her husband, but she’s beginning to realise that she’s sacrificed her career for his rather lofty dreams. So she takes their son to California and moves in with her mother (Julie Hagerty). Charlie is completely floored because he didn’t see it coming. He really doesn’t know what to do, except to agree, reluctantly, with Nicole that if they have to divorce they should do it as cheaply as possible and involve lawyers as little as possible — “we’ll do it gently,” Nicole promises.

Fat chance. Nicole’s celebrity lawyer, Nora Fanshaw (a superb Laura Dern), has her own ideas about making the husband pay so, in retaliation, Charlie seeks help from a predatory $1000-per-hour lawyer (Ray Liotta) before switching to one who is far less aggressive (Alan Alda).

It soon becomes clear that a cross-country divorce, involving the legal systems of two states, will be both complicated and costly no matter how well-intentioned the combatants might be.

Baumbach divides the running time of this totally absorbing 2¼-hour drama almost equally between Nicole and Charlie and in the process offers insights into the strengths and flaws of both. He doesn’t take sides, but emphasises the toll the proceedings take on both of these attractive people who once loved one another so much and who now find communication awkward and difficult.

Driver and Johansson are extremely charismatic actors and the characters they play, for all their flaws, are attractive human beings. It’s not easy to choose between them, and the trauma of divorce will affect each one of them forever, with neither emerging the winner. This terrific movie, so honest, open, smart and touching, is a little gem.

Marriage Story (M)

Limited cinema release prior to Netflix streaming

★★★★½

 

-

‘TRUE STORY’ OF AFRICAN SKINHEAD FAILS TO CONVINCE

Films do not get to be more personal than ­Farming. Writer-director Adewale Akinnuoye-Agjabe, making his first feature, is telling us his own story, what really happened to him as the child of Nigerian parents growing up in the depressing town of Tilbury, Essex, in the 1960s and 70s. He even films the house in which he grew up, and enacts the role of his own father. And it’s quite a story.

It seems that back then the children of African parents were habitually fostered out (“farmed”) to white working-class British families. The real parents paid a fee for this fostering in addition to which the foster parents received welfare. It was a nice little earner that suited the real parents — who were able to study or to go to work unencumbered — as well as the foster parents, because it brought much-needed cash to impoverished homes.

As part of this policy the infant Enitan is handed over by his father (Akinnuoye-Agjabe) and mother (Genevieve Nnaji) to Ingrid Carpenter (Kate Beckinsale, woefully miscast), a woman who has as many as 10 African kids in her care at any one time. Eni grows up to be a shy boy, given to hiding behind the sofa rather than playing with the other children. Ingrid’s method of discipline is to threaten to send a kid who misbehaves back to “Wooga-Wooga Land”, but the boy experiences far worse treatment at school where he’s the subject of extreme racist bullying.

By the time he’s become a teenager (played with steely passion by Damson Idris), Eni is a bitter, angry young man who hates the very fact that he’s black. Tormented by a local gang of skinheads, led by the odious Levi (John Dalgleish), Eni makes a decision that seems too incredible to be true — he decides to join forces with his enemy and become a member of the gang. He calls his sympathetic teacher, Miss Dapo (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) “a black bastard” and takes part in racist rampages that evoke Romper Stomper in their ugly intensity.

Although we know the story is true, it’s frankly unbelievable. To start with, Beckinsale never convinces as the Fagin-like figure from the lower depths that she’s supposed to be. She comes across as a well-educated, highly trained actor playing the part of a working-class battler. Even worse, the film’s main narrative — that a black kid joins a gang of racist whites — beggars belief. As presented in the film it’s not just difficult to fathom Eni’s motivations in joining the gang — it’s even more difficult to comprehend why they accept him into their midst. It doesn’t help that the one-note villainy of Dalgliesh is so stereotyped — this thug even has a snake as a pet!

At the end of the film there is a photograph of Akinnuoye-Agjabe receiving an award from Princess Anne. Clearly, he showed incredible courage and fortitude to turn his life around, but we don’t see much of that in the film. Rather the emphasis is on the more cinematic scenes of violence and thuggery.

Perhaps the film would have been better if Akinnuoye-Agjabe had given his story to others to write and direct. Maybe he’s too close to the subject, or too inexperienced as a filmmaker to bring his extraordinary story to the screen. It is an extraordinary story, no doubt about that. But Farming fails to convince on too many levels.

Farming (MA15+)

Limited release from Thursday

★★★