Scarlett Johansson

MARRIAGE STORY: the comedy helps us watch the tragedy

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MARRIAGE STORY

Noah Baumbach’s family dramedy Marriage Story, one of the very best films of 2019, traces two good people who care for each other at the end of their marriage.  It’s a heartfelt film about a personal tragedy that has some of the funniest moments on screen this year.

Charlie (Adam Driver) is a theater director and Nicole (Scarlett Johannson) is an actress.   They are married with an eight-year-old son Henry.  Nicole’s career is taking her to California, while Charlie’s is anchored to his beloved New York.  Adults might be able to manage a bicoastal relationship, but the kid needs to have his school and his friends in one place or the other. 

The two try to complete an amicable divorce, but their disagreement over the kid’s primary home unintentionally plunges them into a litigation nightmare, with a cascade of stress added by the lawyers and the courts.  It’s been written elsewhere, but I need to add that Nicole and Charlie are horrified by a system that is working as designed.  There’s a wonderful shot of Charlie and Nicole sitting apart on an near-empty subway car, exhausted, bereft and unable to support each other.

In a masterstroke, Baumbach introduces his lead characters with each spouse’s assessment of what is so lovable about the other.  Then we sober up when we learn what prompted the essays.

We relate to both Charlie and Nicole, and Driver and Johansson perfectly inhabit these good folks, slipping into a deeper nightmare with each step in the process.  Near the end, the two have the raw argument that they had each been too nice to have before.

I think that the reason Marriage Story works is that Johansson and Driver can go through their characters’ pain with complete authenticity while amidst all the funny supporting characters.  

Laura Dern and Ray Liotta play top echelon Divorce Lawyers to the Stars. Alan Alda plays a sage older attorney who has lost something off his fastball.  Dern’s riotously funny performance is a lock for an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.  Dern, Liotta, Alda, Julie Haggerty, Merritt Wever and Wallace Shawn are each hilarious.  Azhy Robertson (Juliet, Naked) is very good as the kid.

At one point, the court appoints a child evaluator to visit Charlie and judge his relationship with his child.  Having any stranger parachute into your home, with your parenting rights at stake, would be stressful.   Martha Kelly is superb as an especially humorless evaluator, an oddball impervious to Charlie’s charms and oblivious to any of his positive attributes.  As things start going wrong, Charlie gets more and more desperate and the scene gets funnier.

Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver in MARRIAGE STORY

Director Noah Baumbach’s screenplay is informed by the end of his own marriage to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. He acknowledges “a connection to the material”, but that it’s not only about his divorce. He is generous enough to write the character of Charlie with self-absorbed cluelessness about his impact to Nicole’s career aspirations.

I liked Baumbach’s first movie The Squid and the Whale, about his own parents’ divorce. But my reaction to all his subsequent work until now has ranged from to indifference to antipathy; “detest” is the adjective that springs to mind. Despite my bias, I gotta admit that Marriage Story is so, so good that it solidifies Baumbach’s place as an American auteur. Baumbach should head into awards season as the favorite for the screenplay Oscar.

A superb screenplay, superbly acted, Marriage Story balances tragedy and comedy with uncommon success. It’s a masterpiece, and among the very best cinema of 2019. It’s a Must See. I saw Marriage Story in early October at the Mill Valley Film Festival.  You can find it theaters now, and it will stream on Netflix beginning on Friday, December 6.

DVD/Stream of the Week: Her

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her1Her, the latest from writer-director Spike Jonze is about as inventive at his Being John Malkovitch – and that’s really saying something. Joaquin Phoenix stars as a lonely guy fascinated by his breathtakingly intuitive new computer operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johannson). This new operating system is SO intuitive that it molds itself to please him, constantly fine tuning itself into the image of his ideal companion – and he falls in love.

It’s set in a technologically not-so-distant future (but far enough in the future that everyone in LA lives and works in highrises and takes transit, even to the beach). Along with the absurd premise, Jonze sprinkles in some brilliantly funny touches. There’s a blind date with a knockout (Olivia Wilde) that spirals out of control with stunning suddenness. There’s an inspired bit with a waitperson interrupting the diners with “How’s everything?” (one of my personal pet peeves) at precisely the most awkward moment possible. A video game figure is cuddly looking but shockingly abusive. Here’s one more sly touch – a future male fashion of awkwardly high-waisted pants. Lots of smart laughs.

Her is one of the more thought-provoking films of the year – why did the main character’s most recent relationship fail? Does he really know what he wants and needs? Can he give enough to make a reciprocal relationship work?

Joaquin Phoenix is very good, as are Wilde, Kirsten Wiig, Chris Pratt, Rooney Mara and Amy Adams. Scarlett Johannson, however, is a revelation; equipped only with her husky voice, she dominates the film. It’s an extraordinary performance.

All this being said, Her is not a perfect film – it drags in places. But between Johannson’s performance and Jonze’s wacky but thought-provoking story, Her is a winner – and on my Best Movies of 2013.  Her is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Under the Skin: unsatisfying…but, then again, there’s Scarlett

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under skinUnder the Skin is the most bizarro movie of the year so far – by a long shot.  A space alien in the form of a human woman attracts men sexually and then harvests their bodies. As each man steps forward, entranced in lust, he doesn’t notice that he is sinking into an ever deeper black pool until he vanishes.   Later, we learn that he is suspended in the viscous liquid until, suddenly, his body is deflated like a popped balloon, leaving just the latex-like skin, while a red pulp (presumably pulverized human bone and tissue) heads up on a conveyor belt to the aliens for their use.  This lurid story is set in the gloomy dank of Scotland and yo-yos between the gritty streets of Glasgow and a highly stylized sci-fi world a la Solaris.

Scarlett Johansson, who puts the lure in allure, plays the alien who any heterosexual man would crawl on his knees across broken glass for.  Scarlett is a helluva good sport.  Johansson is that rare A-list movie star who doesn’t take herself too seriously and has VERY good taste.  You can’t criticize her for picking up a paycheck in the occasional comic book movie when you consider a body of top-tier work that is remarkable for a 29-year-old:  Ghost World, Lost in Translation, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Match Point, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Her.  Here, she is suitably sensual and perfectly nails the alien’s changing degree of emotional detachment/attachment, which is really the core of the movie (I think).  And she gets naked several times.

Director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) co-wrote the screenplay with Walter Campbell from a Michael Faber novel.  This is NOT a movie for those who need to know what is going on at all times.  And, to connect the dots the best we can, we have to sit through some VERY repetitive action.

Again and again, the alien drives around Glasgow, scanning hundreds of men, asking the ones with the most unintelligible accents for directions and picking up the single ones.  This happens a lot.  She has an alien handler in the form of a human man dressed in motorcycle gear, who strides around with aggressive purposefulness and speeds around the Scottish back roads on his bike and never speaks.  This happens a lot, too.

Under the Skin is getting critical praise (currently a Metacritic score of 77), which I attribute to its novel look and overall trippiness and to its being the first movie in three months that challenges the audience.  But overall, the payoff isn’t really worth watching the repetition, trying to figure out what’s going on and why.

SPOILER ALERT:  As an alien people-harvester, she is initially emotionally uninvolved with humans.  She has no reaction to a family beach tragedy that would highly disturb a human.  Dragged into a disco, she is disoriented until some poor guy chats her up and she can lapse into the role she was trained/programmed for.

But then she picks up an Elephant Man for harvesting; she is touched by his longing for companionship and sex – and ends up letting him go.  Another man shows her kindness and she tries out humanity, tapping her fingers to human music, trying a bite of chocolate cake (and spitting it out, gagging).  She attaches to the kind man but finds herself biologically unequipped to take the relationship to a new level.

And there are some holes in the story.  If this alien race is so advanced, why can’t her handler find her with some GPS-like capacity?  Why don’t the aliens harvest more people, and why do they just pick the solitary loners?  Why don’t they consume the skin? But that’s just thinking too much about Under the Skin.

Her: boy meets operating system

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her1Her, the latest from writer-director Spike Jonze is about as inventive at his Being John Malkovitch – and that’s really saying something.  Joaquin Phoenix stars as a lonely guy fascinated by his breathtakingly intuitive new computer operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johannson).  This new operating system is SO intuitive that it molds itself to please him, constantly fine tuning itself into the image of his ideal companion – and he falls in love.

It’s set in a technologically not-so-distant future (but far enough in the future that everyone in LA lives and works in highrises and takes transit, even to the beach).  Along with the absurd premise, Jonze sprinkles in some brilliantly funny touches.  There’s a blind date with a knockout (Olivia Wilde) that spirals out of control with stunning suddenness.  There’s an inspired bit with a waitperson interrupting the diners with “How’s everything?” (one of my personal pet peeves) at precisely the most awkward moment possible.  A video game figure is cuddly looking but shockingly abusive.  Here’s one more sly touch – a future male fashion of awkwardly high-waisted pants.  Lots of smart laughs.

Her is one of the more thought-provoking films of the year – why did the main character’s most recent relationship fail?  Does he really know what he wants and needs? Can he give enough to make a reciprocal relationship work?

Joaquin Phoenix is very good, as are Wilde, Kirsten Wiig, Chris Pratt, Rooney Mara and Amy Adams.  Scarlett Johannson, however, is a revelation; equipped only with her husky voice, she dominates the film.  It’s an extraordinary performance.

All this being said, Her is not a perfect film – it drags in places.   But between Johannson’s performance and Jonze’s wacky but thought-provoking story, Her is a winner – and on my Best Movies of 2013.

Don Jon: guffaws and self-discovery

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote/directed/stars in Don Jon, the story of a Guido whose pursuit of a stunning hottie (Scarlett Johansson) is stymied by his porn addiction.  With help from an older woman (Julianne Moore), he recognizes what will really make him happy.

It’s just a light comedy, but Gordon-Levitt has a very smart take on romantic comedy – one that takes some unexpected turns until a moment of self discovery.  Gordon-Levitt is getting good parts (Inception, 50/50, Looper, Lincoln) and big paychecks (The Dark Knight Rises), so he doesn’t have to write his own stuff – but I’m glad that he gave us Don Jon.

Tony Danza is pretty funny as the Guido dad.