Marriage Story: Where is the Divorce?

         

Marriage Story is a film about divorce.  Having been divorced, I suggest you avoid getting a divorce if you can.  This movie starts with the premise that you can, somehow, make a divorce be an integral part of a marriage.  At its very best, I suppose that is what you shoot for.  This movie shoots for that, but I think that the writers are really hoping for a fantasy solution to the dilemma of being divorced – especially when there is a child involved.  They say, in effect, "We have been lovers, after all, and friends, and we both love our child… Why can’t the divorce just be the next step in the marriage?"

I watched this movie with the Reluctant Wife and the younger Reluctant Stepdaughter.  The Reluctant Wife had seen it before, but when the reluctant stepdaughter expressed interest in seeing this rather than the Irishman, the R.W. agreed to watch it again.  What the Reluctant Wife had said about this film is that both of the lead characters are believable and understandable – you can see both perspectives.  There is no bad guy in this film – or there are two bad guys – depending on how you think about it.  This makes for a richer and, I think, more reality based movie.

The film opens with Charlie Barber (played by Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) recounting each other’s virtues as they do voice overs reading the descriptions of each other that they have written to start the process of a mediated divorce.  We get to hear what wonderful – and flawed – people they are through each other’s eyes.  We hear the deep affection that these two people have felt for each other.  But they don’t get to hear it – at least not yet.  Nicole refuses to play along with the mediator and storms out of the meeting before either of them reads what they have written.

Marriages are touted as being about living happily ever after.  In fact, they are about learning how to negotiate.  In the old days, men were given, by custom but also by law, the right to determine everything about the direction of the family – including where they were going to live.  This is an indefensible solution to an essential problem.  A marriage is a union between two people, each of whom has their own agenda and, if it is to be a democracy, each party can cast exactly 50% of the votes - with no Vice President to cast the tie breaker.  It becomes a union that is built on a system that can devolve into gridlock.  Oh, sure, you can compromise on some things.  But there are others – Will we live on the east coast or the west? – where there is no half way solution.

The divorce in this movie is based on Nicole’s experience of being overshadowed by Charlie.  Charlie is a great guy.  He is an up and coming avant garde director in New York. Charlie has built a troupe of players who trust him and each other. Nicole is his star actress. She drew the audiences in at the beginning, but he has become the marquee draw.  She wants to assert herself – to explore her capacities as an actress, but also as a director.  Charlie has talked about moving to LA to support her opportunities for roles and he has talked about having her direct works that the troupe presents, but these talks have never turned into action items.  At heart, he doesn’t want to give up what they’ve (and here, I think, what he’s) built.  She doesn’t want to continue to be confined by who they, as a couple have become.

So, in addition to having failed to figure out how to negotiate, the partners have grown in various ways – and the original contract between them does not work so well.  The original contract included Nicole’s being the supportive spouse.  She entered the relationship prepared to support Charlie in his career.  She signed on to be the supporting actress.  Across time, she has begun to think that she is deserving of top billing – and of growing and developing in her own way.  Charlie hasn’t really seen that she has grown – he is still dealing with the version of her that existed when they were first married.  As a result, he continues to think that she will go along with him.  And he does not see himself as being as overbearing as Nicole experiences him as being.

Indeed, it is hard for us to see Charlie as overbearing in the beginning.  In their voice overs, Charlie picks up after Nicole.  She is absent minded and moody and Charlie is the stabilizing force – giving of himself over and over to keep her on steady ground.  She looks like the needy one and he looks like the one who is carrying most of the load – until she steps into a divorce attorney’s office.  The divorce attorney, Nora (Laura Dern), helps Nicole articulate an alternative narrative.  Charlie is controlling.  He has not been responsive to Nora’s needs to develop.  He has, while being incredibly flexible on the small stuff, consistently made the big decisions and he has made them in such a way that he always benefits from them.  He is the Director, after all.  He is used to making the decisions that matter.  "Do it this way – I am the objective observer and I know how this will look to the audience.  You need me to tell you how to do what needs to be done." 

I think this film is based in fantasy.  It is not about what actually happens in a divorce.  Oh, lots of stuff depicted here does happen in divorces.  But the particular arc of this divorce process does not add up.  I think it is about two things, told simultaneously.  The first is something like a process that can occur in a “good” divorce.  It is a process of each person discovering the ways in which they have failed to be the partners that they needed to be.  The second is something that happens in all divorces.  These two people become furious with each other.  “Good" Divorces, I think, involve managing the fury.  "Good" divorces involve feeling the feelings, but somehow managing to limit the impact of them – on the partner, but especially on the child or children.

Nicole and Charlie do a reasonable job of not channeling the anger between them through their child.  Their child becomes a messenger, but he doesn’t get used as a pawn, despite Nora’s efforts to have Nicole use him that way.  And he is the chip on the table that the action revolves around, but not through.  Nora claims that he is a California resident – Nicole has moved him to California to be with her – temporarily in Charlie’s mind – but permanently, in Nicole’s.  Charlie is behind the curve and playing catch up.  He continues to think they will have an amicable divorce long after Nicole and Nora have made it clear that ship has sailed.

Even after he knows that Nicole is pulling out all the stops, Charlie appears to be playing along.  But he finally gets pushed into a corner and he comes out swinging.  He finds his own bulldog lawyer and things get ugly in the courtroom.  But they really get ugly when the two of them try to get together to get things back on track.  Instead of an olive branch, they go at it hammer and tongs.  Here we learn that good old Charlie has, in fact, been quite angry for quite some time.  He has been faithful, more or less, to Nicole at a time when he doesn’t want to be and when she has withdrawn from him.  He hates her.  And she hates him.  And it isn’t pretty.

If we started with an idealized version of this couple, we now see them at their worst.  And they have not seen themselves at their worst.  Charlie spirals without control into rage.  Nicole becomes nakedly cutting and inconsiderate.  This is the scene that, I believe, clarifies that this movie is, in addition to being a film about a divorce, a fantasy.  It allows Charlie and Nicole to say the things that divorcing couples think.  Perhaps the things that all couples think.  When I was in the midst of my divorce, a friend told me that the difference between couples that divorce and those that don’t is that those who stay together want to stay together.  But I also think that couples who stay together don’t say the things that they think at critical moments in order to preserve the relationship – even in the midst of a divorce.  They might refer to them once they resolve – or say, “Wow, you wouldn’t believe how angry I was with you two months ago,” but to strike while the iron is hot is, I think, not a cathartic moment, but a poisonous one.

The fantasy of letting it all out is that the poison will be released and you will feel cleansed.  I think the reality is that this much poison kills the relationship. This scene is, then, not a record of what actually happens in a “good” divorce, but is a record of what occurs – especially for the person being left – when the unreality of the situation – the disorientation of things having changed and being out of control – sinks in – and you deal with it.  But it is unreal that this takes place with your soon to be ex-spouse.  It is a continuation of the fantasy that we are still married.

Now there are couples who thrive on conflict and passion and may, in fact, need drama, for lack of a better word, to know that they are loved.  But this is not one of those marriages.  These people need to feel support from those around them – they do not do well when others doubt or confront them. Perhaps because of that they have not asserted themselves across the course of the relationship. If they had, maybe they would have allowed each other to grow in the context of the relationship, but they didn’t.  As the reluctant wife has said on other occasions, in divorce there is a bunch of ugly stuff.  You can eat it, or your kids will eat it, but somebody’s got to eat it.  Here, the couple decide that they will force feed it to each other.

Some things, once said, cannot be unsaid.  This scene includes things that can’t be unsaid. 

My saying that good marriages (and good divorces) are founded on what is not said may sound anti-psychoanalytic.  It certainly sounds that way to me.  Isn’t psychoanalysis about saying the things that come to mind?  Isn’t it about saying those things that you think but don’t say?  I think that this interaction helps clarify that the analytic relationship is an “as if” relationship.  When you say something to an analyst – it is "as if" they are your spouse, your mother, your father, your brother or your sister.  But they are not.  They can talk with you about what it is like to articulate that thought.  They can help you reflect on what you have thought.  And they don’t take personally what you have said.  It is not directed at their actual person, but at the person who it is that they represent.

Part of being divorced is coming to terms with the failure to stay married; coming to terms with failing to be the people that you imagined you would be to and for each other.  Coming to terms with that is ugly and, weirdly, private.  We get married – indeed we love – because we hope that being connected with another will make us better – and we can make them better.  In fact, being married – as rewarding as it is, is also expensive.  And when we acknowledge those costs – and pin them on the other person – we fail.  We move towards divorce.  It is only when we come to grips with our own failings, however, that we begin to have a successful divorce.  When we no longer need to beat the other person up in order to feel ourselves cleansed of the poison – when we are able to digest that poison – then we begin to be whole again.

So the scene is essential.  It is about digesting the poison.  The part that makes it a fantasy is that it takes place between Charlie and Nicole.  That it can occur within the marital relationship.  If that were able to happen, then the divorce would not be necessary.  One of the ironies of divorce – when you have children – is that you do, in fact, never leave the relationship.  In the best divorces, the parents are able to keep in mind what is in the best interests of the child or children and to continue to share parenting them. 

My relieved ex-spouse and I have been able to do a reasonably good job of doing that.  We are in each other’s lives.  But we also are, in some very important ways, not. I think that the kind of love that we had for each other – as in the case of the love that these two people had for each other – could not survive the marriage.  I think titling this The Marriage Story leaves out the important step, in a marriage like this, of becoming divorced.

The movie ends where it began - with the description of Charlie through Nicole's eyes, but this time that description is being read by their son, and Charlie has to help him with the hard words.  He finally hears how much Nicole gets him - how much she has always deeply loved him.  And it hurts him, and I think us, that these two could not stay married.  We are pleased that they are building the kind of post-divorce relationship we should all aspire to.  I think that if we are to achieve it in our real, off-screen lives, we actually need to exercise more restraint than was displayed on the screen.  Perhaps we need to expel the poison – but I think we need to do that in the context of a different relationship – telling a friend (or therapist) just exactly how angry we are with this person that we have totally trusted.  I think the lives of those of us who go through a divorce are every bit as tumultuous as the one’s depicted here – and in that sense this movie tracks with what takes place in a “good” divorce.  But I don’t think that this movie confronts the terribly isolating and lonely process of becoming a divorced person – perhaps the makers feared that would be too difficult for the audience to bear.  

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