Marriage Story (2019) *

This will be more of a warning than a review, because I only watched half the movie. Why did I bail? Because this film is miserable and depressing. If I want to see a realistic depiction of a nasty divorce, I'll just go on Facebook.

Noah Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale”) wrote and directed this story of a writer/director's divorce from his actress wife, and the fight over their kid. Despite any denials the director may make, it's basically the story of his own divorce from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Adam Driver plays Charlie, a talented theater director. He and his actress wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) are kind of a big deal in the New York theater scene, but Nicole's ambition is to get back to TV and movies, and this ambition rips their marriage apart. We meet them attempting to mediate a divorce, but, as tends to happen in divorce, things escalate. Nicole takes their son to L.A., gets a lawyer, and soon what started as an amicable “conscious decoupling” turns into as nasty a divorce as any.

What happens next? Maybe a giant asteroid menaces earth. Maybe aliens invade, and Charlie and Nicole are reunited as freedom fighters. Maybe they have a steamy threesome with cast-mate Laura Dern. I wouldn't know, because I couldn't watch the rest of this boring piece of crap. Do you remember how you felt the second or third time you watched “Kramer vs Kramer?” Me neither, because nobody watches divorce dramas a second time, which makes me question why we watch them the first time.

The sad thing is that “Marriage Story” is not “bad” in the sense that most bad movies are bad. The cast is excellent, and the dialogue is well-written. The problem is that I didn't like the characters or what was happening to them. I hated Nicole for being a ball-busting harpy, while passively-aggressively pretending not to be. I hated Charlie for letting a woman with such bad hair rake him over the coals. Then, of course, you have to remember that this is Noah Baumbach telling HIS version of his own divorce. That's his prerogative, but I can't think of a reason we should subject ourselves to it.

1 star out of 5