In Marriage Story (now streaming on Netflix), there is a moment so infinitesimal that you can miss it if you just blink. A child caught between his politely but stubbornly adversarial parents, is seen playing with two toys in a quiet corner. And then he speaks as one toy to another, “I was falling and you didn’t catch me.”
That statement exactly sums up the failed marriage between Charlie Barber (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson). And it explains just why relationships fail. Between parents and children. Spouses. Lovers. Friends.
If we don’t watch our loved ones closely enough, we won’t be there to catch them when they fall.
Adam Driver’s Charlie finds this out when he accidentally cuts his wrist, wraps his wound with kitchen napkins and falls flat, in a broken heap on the floor.
It is possibly the first time in years that he has fallen with nobody to catch him.
And this is also possibly the first time, he has realised that he wasn’t present in his marriage for someone other than himself .
To do the emotional heavy lifting, to be a parent all by himself, to focus on something or someone other than his own ambition to be an emerging theatre legend.
This Noah Baumbach film is not a hypertensive drama about a spectacularly dysfunctional marriage.
It is about the small nicks on the skin of a relationship that are left unattended for too long.
It is the portrait of an intimate marriage that at some point ceases to be so because the habitual giver in it realises that her life force is being expended to feed the other. And that the fire she was drawn to, doesn’t warm her soul any more. As she says, ” I realized, I never really came alive by myself. I was just feeding his aliveness.”
The film articulates just how hard it is for women to take up space not just in a marriage but outside of it. To claim “a little bit of earth” as their own.
So Nora (Laura Dern) , the razor sharp yet empathetic divorce lawyer tells Nicole , “what you are doing is an act of hope. You are telling yourself that you deserve more.”
She also astutely tells Nicole that she should never admit her frailties as a woman and a parent because mothers are not forgiven for being human.
And even as Nicole bravely tries to begin a new life, she teeters between simmering anger and overwhelming compassion for the man whose creative energy she once fell in love with almost instantly. Their life was however an animated conversation about everything other than their life. Hers, to be specific. Because Charlie never saw her. As her own person.
And that is why when they are finally alone to talk about their impending divorce, he does not know what to say. Because, he has to take her needs into consideration finally.
He is not a dangerously toxic partner. Just terminally self-involved. He cheats once but blames it on her. And makes her doubt the quality of the work she is being offered. And then suggests that she invest her pay cheque into his theatre company. And he cannot believe that she will not return.
He even screams once that she will never be happy because she will always find something or someone to rebel against.
When he visits her after a long time apart, the first thing he talks about is the lucrative grant he has won. Because, he is still focussed on what he will do next.
Still their separation never seems brutal even when it is. Like the time, she orders a meal for him during their divorce proceedings.
Or the night, they share a bed with their child and she cries while he reads a bedtime story to him.
Or when he helps her shut the gate of her house and their eyes lock over the sliding panels.
Or when she cuts his hair because she always did it.
Or when she consoles him even after he has hurled the most vicious curses at her for making him go through so much uncertainty in his personal and professional life.
Because, that is what so many women do. Understand why men hurt them and offer them empathy even when they are given so little of it.
Even Nicole’s own mother doesn’t get her need for a new existence. She gaslights her, openly shows her preference for her son-in-law and compares her daughter’s marriage to her own which she believes was much worse.
What the film focusses on among other things is just what happens when a woman begins to choose herself over the dynamics of her marriage. When she refuses to give in and finally gives up on the things holding her back. When for the first time in her marital life, she stops making things convenient for everybody and decides to do something just for herself.
In this case, an acting job in a city that she loves. In a role where she is not constantly being corrected by her exacting director/husband. Nicole doesn’t rub it in but her moment of triumph comes when she wins a prestigious award nomination for a job Charlie never trusted her with. Direction.
So yes, this film is not a Kramer vs Kramer. Here a woman is not subliminally shamed for her need for self-expression. Nor is she shown up as a maternal failure to bring into sharper focus, her spouse’s single-mindedly dedicated parenting.
There is that mandatory, almost brutal court room scene, some swearing, a punch in the wall, a melt down over the phone and in person, but both partners stay cognisant of each other’s humanity. And so do we.
In a moving open mic sequence near the end, Charlie narrates Being Alive by Stephen Sondheim and
for the first time acknowledges the beauty and the devastation that his marriage has brought to his life. He now knows the value and the price of a once-in-lifetime connection.
And that scene where Nicole ties his shoelace even though they have now decisively built separate lives?
The film seems to say that even though at times, we must say our goodbyes in order to save ourselves, we can reach out still once in a while to catch each other from falling.

**Reema is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of  Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a  translator who recently interpreted  Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an  RJ  and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US . She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.