Marriage Story. Noah Baumbach. 2019. ☆☆☆☆★★
Oh, I’ve seen reviews of this movie in all the newspapers. And it’s always that way: A Netflix movie either has no presence whatsoever in mass media or it’s absolutely everywhere. So I guess that there’s certain Netflix movies that Netflix pushes really hard, and the rest they just drop into the void without any trace?
Scarlett Johansson is a great actor, of course, and Adam Driver is… er… a big name at the moment?
It starts off well with a double monologue thing that’s intriguing, but it’s over a bed of schmaltzy classicalish music that absolutely drives me nuts. How can anybody stand that stuff?
So I’m conflicted right from the start.
Emacs tells me that I’ve seen one of Baumbach’s movies before: Frances Ha at 20150411T211713. But that was before I was blogging about any random movie, so I have no idea what I thought of it.
See? All The Reviewers. Hm… OK, it had a very limited theatrical release — sixteen cinemas? But that’s enough to get all these newspapers to write about it?
Fortunately the musical bed disappears. I would have gone totally nuts.
Hey, this is pretty funny! One good line after another.
Adam Driver is surprisingly good. The constant stream of really famous actors doing supporting roles gets a bit “wha but wha” after a while… perhaps it’s too much? But I don’t mind. It’s fun.
Laura Dern is pure awesomeness.
Except the cringe comedy passages. I just can’t deal with that.
I think this movie worked perfectly for the first hour, and then it takes a nose dive. In between the interesting scenes, there’s scenes of pure tedium. I kinda started hating this movie at certain points.
This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.