Movie "Marriage Story": When Divorce Doesn't Solve the Problem
Together with the director Noah Baumbaku and the heroes of the movie "The Marriage Story", the audience goes through a difficult path from selfishness and domination to the desire to make the other person happier and, as a result, themselves …
American director Noah Baumbach made an unusually truthful film "The Marriage Story" about a married couple, about two gifted people who are in the process of divorce. Divorce, like a scalpel, reveals the main problems of human relations - the inability and unwillingness to hear the other, to respect him as an individual.
Marriage story
He is a talented director. She is a talented actress. He loves her. She loves him. He considers her good, but loving to whine. She considers him good, but too overbearing. He is passionate about work. She secretly feels unfulfilled. He is absolutely satisfied with family life. She is not satisfied with their relationship.
Family or self-realization? Nicole, the main character of the movie "Marriage Story", decides this question for herself. Continue to feel unhappy or still step into the world of your desires and ambitions?
If you do not take into account the professions of a husband and wife, then isn't it just an ordinary family history? A dissatisfied wife, about whom, after the first frames of the film, we can say that she is “mad with fat”. It is completely incomprehensible, what else does she need? The husband is successful in the profession, an assistant in the house, a good father. But in each specific case, dissatisfaction can be caused by different reasons, and in the film "Marriage Story", it is the acting professions of the heroes related to culture and creativity that help us understand the situation of discord in this family.
Who is a good actor
Culture, art is the sphere of activity of people with a visual vector, especially sensitive people, who know how to sympathize, empathize, emotionally turn on, that is, build emotional connections between people. Literature, theater, cinema, fashion, etiquette, moral norms - all this was created and is being created by visual women and men.
A good actor is a combination of qualities inherent not only in the visual, but also in the skin vector. Imaginative thinking, emotional memory or memory for feelings, intelligible speech and correct intonation, imagination - from the visual vector. A sense of rhythm, plasticity, purposefulness, desire for fame and success - from the skin.
The profession of an artist is one of the oldest and most difficult. This is creativity, emotional return and transmission of feelings and states to the audience, awakening in them a sense of involvement in what is happening. Such abilities are in the skin-visual woman. Unlike women with other vectors, she has a specific role in society, which means that the desire to fulfill this role is inherent in her from the very beginning. In the modern world, skin-visual women also realize themselves as art historians, psychologists, nurses and doctors, social workers and literature teachers.
From blues to riot
Nicole is a talented actress. This is evidenced by the success of her husband Charlie's productions, in which she plays the main roles. Charlie and Nicole got married young. She at that time successfully played her first role in a movie, he is an aspiring director. Both have ambitions, a desire for fame and success. Therefore, from Los Angeles, the girl's hometown, they move to the city of fortune - New York.
But a few years later, when the couple is already growing up a son, Nicole decides to file for divorce and return to her mother's house in Los Angeles, she is tired of feeling herself on the sidelines next to her husband. It seems to her that Charlie appropriates her thoughts, ideas, projects and is realized thanks to the comfortable conditions that she created for him. Nicole is moping, hesitating, not sure if she's doing the right thing, and ashamed to destroy her family. After all, she loves her husband, and they also have a little son.
Unlike Nicole, Charlie takes the divorce calmly, not admitting the thought that something could change dramatically - the ex-wife will continue to work in the theater, the son will be with him. He is sure that it is possible to peacefully resolve the situation, stay on good terms with each other, not harm his son, and so far he does not understand Nicole's deep feelings.
Awareness of the depth of the crisis begins for him with losses: the unexpected move of his wife to Los Angeles, the need to fly there from New York and return, because there are professional obligations to the theater troupe due to the grant received to stage his play on Broadway, separation from his son …
For Charlie, stability in the family is important, the inviolability of the usual way of life. In his professional life, he is different - he is mobile, attentive to colleagues, solves directorial, organizational, financial tasks, so he is annoyed by trips that break his usual schedule, financial and temporary losses. However, his son is important to him, and it is for him that Charlie flies to Los Angeles.
A surprise for him was the desire of his wife to resolve issues through the court. Charlie begins to realize that the world built in his mind is crumbling. Nobody is going to quietly (as usually happened in their family) obey and do as it is convenient for "everyone", that is, him. He does not admit that someone does not agree with his idea of the good, because it is the most correct. This is the moment in the film where Charlie thinks that loved ones may have other desires where he has no place. For example, that the wife wants to act in films, and the son likes to live in another city, where he has new friends and a school.
A family
The family is those whom we love, whom we care about, whom we wish good and happiness. A family is close people, sometimes so close that one of the couple allows himself to disregard his partner. And very often it is the one who cares, cares, cares, not paying attention to the desires of the other, following only their invented plan, completely oblivious to the fact that the other is cramped within these frameworks, that he is suffocating under “kind” violence. After all, this concern is more like control and leadership.
Charlie is kind and sincerely caring - he cooks, strokes, cleans up, turns off the light for Nicole, gets up at night for his son. Charlie is a director and he remains a director at home. He doesn't see Nicole as a person. For him she has long been something called Role: Wife, Henry's mother, Actress. The role does not imply a living person with desires - it is like a thing that you can put on and take off and put on something else. Therefore, Charlie is so confused and discouraged by the unexpected situation for him, in which Nicole manifests her will, moves away from him, including physically, leaving with her son to his mother.
Nicole does not like household chores, is slovenly, her mood changes quickly, but she knows everything about Charlie: what he likes, what salad he will order in a restaurant, knows how difficult it is for him to make choices in household chores. The decision to divorce is not easy for Nicole, but she quickly adapts and, having received a role in the film, begins to feel independent and independent. She no longer wants to feel like an attachment to her director-husband.
Bad good
It is interesting that the emotional, stormy showdown of the characters' relations with each other occurs only towards the end of the film. Usually it happens the other way around: first, the statement of everything that has accumulated, and then a divorce follows. Why did Charlie and Nicole have a silent conflict for so long?
There is an episode in the film where the director Charlie gives the stage task to the actress Nicole: "Walk like you are crawling." And the heroine is not surprised at the task at hand, she is familiar with it. She lives like this - outwardly she walks, but in reality she crawls crushed, not having the strength to rise and break through the sunken ceiling of her husband's opinion. Nicole's nature is to jump to the ceiling with joy, from a filled inner source of happiness, or weep, choking, deeply experiencing grief, misfortune. Nicole can't really cry for a long time. At the beginning of the film, when Charlie remarks that she is crushing her emotions, she complains that she does not know how to cry on stage.
For Nicole, to rise, to break through the ceiling means to start talking with her husband, to argue, to defend the right to her desires. However, she only suffices for thoughts of hypothetical missed opportunities, for whining that she sacrificed herself to the family, faint hints that she feels bad, that her views are not taken into account. She is afraid, afraid that Charlie will torture with explanations, shake out her soul and … will not understand.
It turned out to be easier for her to file for divorce, to run away than to openly defend her desires. After all, this requires courage, honesty, sincerity, openness of relations. On the other hand, some people are so stubborn in their views that it is very difficult to find understanding with them until such changes occur in life that shake them up and disrupt the usual course of life.
And here's what is paradoxical: both Nicole and Charlie - people of art, freely playing other people's feelings, able to convey a wide range of emotional states - were unable to build a human connection with each other. Lies, claims, suppression, remarks, blaming others for their problems instead of such important heart-to-heart conversations, frank discussions of their own, not others' feelings. Talking about life "little things", which are the building blocks for the thin thread of love that binds the hearts of people.
Charlie and Nicole never learned to live together, did not become relatives to each other. Each of them is right in his own way, and it turned out that only a divorce made it possible for former spouses to hear each other, express their accumulated and painful, and reveal the reasons for the collapse of the family.
Divide but don't rule
If the Drivers did not have a son, they might have parted as friends. Or they parted in grudges against each other, but it would have happened more or less peacefully. But … they have a son, Henry. The fact that not everything is in order in the family can be understood by watching the boy during the film - he suffers from constipation, is inattentive, and does not read well. His parents, of course, love him, each of them needs him, and therefore the struggle for Henry unfolds.
Charlie fights because this is a son, this is his own blood, and family ties are important to him. Charlie's childhood traumas also surface when he felt unnecessary in his own family - in the film he repeats the phrase: "My son should know that I fought for him."
Nicole knows that the father will have no time to take care of his son, that Charlie has not learned to hear the desires of those close to him, Henry will suffer, so the boy needs more motherly care. In the film, Driver's stubbornness is vividly manifested on Halloween, when he drags a tired and already celebrated boy around the city with his mother and friends, also forcing him to put on a costume that the child did not want.
Make someone happier
The fact that the changes have come becomes clear in the last frames of the film. Having gone through a difficult divorce process and a frank conversation with Nicole, Charlie finally understands and accepts his loneliness, sees the measure of his guilt, so obediently begins to do everything necessary to see his son as often as possible, to be closer to him. Driver overshadows his desires and moves to Los Angeles to create a favorable environment for Henry.
His attentiveness to his wife and son shows that not only there was some understanding of the importance of respect for another, but in fact this is confirmed. The final scene with laces gives a hint of a thaw in the relationship, that Nicole appreciated Charlie's willingness to dialogue.
Together with the director Noah Baumbaku and the heroes of the film "Marriage Story", viewers go through a difficult path from selfishness and domination to the desire to make others happier and, as a result, themselves.
