Marriage Story is a breakup film for the millennial era

They’re not likely to attract dating couples to cinemas, but films about marriages and relationships coming apart are surprisingly commonplace. Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, a UK premiere at London Film Festival this week, is only the latest in a very long list of psycho-dramas, vicious comedies, edgy art-house movies and populist tearjerkers about break-up and divorce. They make them in Sweden, they make them in Hollywood. They’re often the cinematic equivalent of slow-motion car crashes. Once loving partners turn against each other, lust is replaced by loathing. Indifference and enmity take over from care and affection. If there are kids involved, they’re bound to be caught up in the crossfire.

The best break-up movies have a level of intimacy and detail that can be painful to watch. This is hardly surprising given that so many of them are autobiographical. It’s territory that Baumbach knows first hand. His parents, writers Jonathan Baumbach and Georgia Brown, were divorced when he was young and he used their split as inspiration for The Squid and the Whale (2005). He was divorced too, from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. “There are things from my experience that of course, I could draw from,” he told the press in advance of the Venice premiere of Marriage Story.

In the film, the tiny details resonate the most strongly. The husband Charlie (Adam Driver) and wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) share observations about one another that are poignant precisely because they are so banal: the way they drink tea or use their strength to open recalcitrant jars or leave socks lying around. Tics of behaviour that start off being endearing become profoundly irritating.

“The fact that I was subconsciously injecting a little of my own life into the story would be evident to most shrinks but, at the time, not to me,” Alan Parker wrote of his 1982 divorce drama, Shoot the Moon, starring Diane Keaton and Albert Finney. “It wasn’t just 120 pages of a script, to be made into a movie, it was like holding up a jagged piece of mirror to my own family and marriage.”

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Swedish director Ingmar Bergman was married five times and had many affairs, none more seismic than the relationship with magazine journalist Gun Hagberg in 1949. “Our love tore our hearts apart and from the very beginning carried its own seeds of destruction,” he later wrote about the relationship. Hagberg was the model for multiple characters in his films. Towards the end of his career, he wrote a screenplay about a break up of a marriage, Faithless (2000), for a film directed by Liv Ullmann. Again, this was directly inspired by his affair with Hagberg.

Bergman is renowned for his probing, painfully frank studies of foundering relationships. “I wonder if there is anything more horrible than a man and wife who hate each other,” is a typical line, inspired by playwright August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death, heard in Scenes From a Marriage (1973). However, the reason that millions of Swedes watched the film (originally shown as a TV series) was its relevance to their lives. It was treated by local audiences as much as marriage guidance counselling as it was as drama. The divorce rate in Sweden is widely reputed to have shot up after the series. And Bergman was forced to go ex-directory (a rarity in Sweden, especially at that time) to avoid telephone calls from strangers wanting to discuss their marriage with him, reports the official Ingmar Bergman website.

Like Baumbach, Bergman approaches divorce in a very matter of fact way. In his films, alongside the scenes of husbands and wives tearing strips off one another, he also often showed how couple’s lives have become so intertwined that they sometimes struggle to remember precisely why they are separating.

To outsiders, there is often something farcical about bickering couples or cheating lovers caught in flagrante. “People laugh at funerals because they’re so agitated,” Liv Ullmann said of the similar sense of embarrassment the characters feel during an incongruously humorous scene in Faithless in which the husband discovers the wife with her lover and they laugh nervously together at the absurdity of their plight.

“Let’s take off our clothes, get into bed and see what happens,” is the remarkably prosaic line we hear before the American archaeologist (Elliott Gould) begins the affair with the happily married wife (Bibi Andersson) of a colleague in Bergman’s The Touch (1971).

In his memoirs, Bergman writes that what really brought him and Hagberg together were the kidneys they ate at an expensive Paris restaurant, which gave them the runs. “We alternately and jointly embraced the lavatory bowl. Until then, shyness in our love had prevented us from using the bathroom’s convenience, and when in need we had pattered off to the considerably less luxurious arrangement in the corridor. At one blow, all discretion was swept away.”

This is the kind of everyday detail also found in Marriage Story – and which gives the film its humour and emotional authenticity. There is a messy intimacy to the filmmaking. As in Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine (2010), part of the audience’s pleasure comes from the fact that the actors giving such raw and seemingly heartfelt performances are major stars. Cianfrance’s film uses handheld camera, lots of blurry close-ups and a famously frank sex scene to give us the illusion that we are looking in at real life. It’s a measure of the brilliance of the acting from Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling that we never doubt that we are watching a real couple trying to cope with a disintegrating marriage.

Husbands and wives know each other so well that they can always zero in on each others’ most vulnerable areas. That is what made the hard-drinking stars Richard Burton and Liz Taylor raging against one another in Mike Nichols’ film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) so invigorating. They reach a level of malice that can only be achieved after spouses have spent years of fetid misery together and know where all the skeletons, real or imagined, are buried.

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Some Hollywood films about marriages breaking up are filmed in such glossy fashion that they play like romantic comedies. Take, for example, the absurdly superficial The Story of Us (2000), starring Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer. The two stars, who play a pampered, middle-aged couple going through a divorce after 15 years of marriage, aren’t willing to dig too deeply into their characters. “I’m sick and tired of being the designated driver in this marriage,” Pfeiffer exclaims at one stage. It’s not exactly a line you will find in a Strindberg play about the collapse of a relationship. The film’s flashbacks to earlier, happier times in the relationship have all the interest of a stranger’s family holiday photo album. It’s trite, anodyne stuff.

Better by far, and more cathartic to watch, is Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses (1989). This is a live-action divorce movie done in the style of an exaggerated and particularly destructive Hanna-Barbera cartoon. The couple (played by Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner) go after each other with a fury that might have startled Tom and Jerry. As the husband and wife, Douglas and Turner don’t give each other an inch. They’re heavyweight stars engaged in a desperate battle to steal scenes from one another. There is no subtlety or restraint here. “When I watch you eat, when I see you asleep, when I look at you lately, I just want to smash your face in,” Turner tells Douglas as the marriage turns rancid – and smash in his face is exactly what she does. In other divorce movies, couples are engaged in psychological warfare. Here, the two spouses go for full-frontal assault.

Marriage Story is a break-up story for the millennial era. The characters played by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver do their very best to arrange an amicable divorce. That is before lawyers, childcare and geography (one lives in New York, the other in LA) come between them. In The War of the Roses, Douglas and Turner don’t even pretend to be civil. By contrast, Johansson and Driver struggle to overcome their own innate desire to be nice to one another.

One other sea change in divorce movies in recent times is that far more attention is paid to children than in the past. “Today we’ve lost God, ethics, everything, but children are sacred,” Liv Ullmann noted of the way filmmakers fuss over the plight of kids caught up in their parents’ break-ups. The shift is noticeable when you compare Robert Benton’s Kramer vs Kramer (1979) with Marriage Story. Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep) may love her doe-eyed son Billy (Justin Henry) but that doesn’t stop her from walking out on the family and leaving Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) to bring up the boy alone. In Marriage Story, by contrast, both partners go to extreme lengths to protect their son. Both are desperate to have access to him. Driver’s character might be a successful stage director in New York, Johansson’s might be an actress with a career that is beginning to blossom in LA, but they still always make time for the child.

Divorce movies have had an uncertain life at the box office. Many have foundered as surely as the relationships that they dramatise. However, this is one genre that never grows old. All that changes is the ways couples find to both to inflict misery on one another and to set about separating.

‘Marriage Story’ has its UK premiere on 6 October at the BFI London Film Festival and then is on general release on 15 Nov