Marriage Story: Till Life and Lawyers Do Us Part

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in "Marriage Story"

Marriage Story opens with a pair of sweet, complementary monologues. First, Charlie (Adam Driver) tells us what he loves about his wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), who then follows with a parallel recitation of what she admires about her husband. Both ruminations are full of affectionate detail and cute peccadilloes: how she leaves cabinets open, how he devours food, how they both play Monopoly like cutthroats. They’re the kind of quotidian observations that can only be amassed through the act of sharing a life, and they’re redolent with warmth and appreciation. Which makes it all the more shocking when these adoring speeches are revealed to be exercises suggested by a mediator, therapeutic assignments designed to mitigate the inevitable pain of their looming divorce.

Well, maybe not shocking, given who’s behind the camera. Even if you have no knowledge of the plot of Marriage Story—which chronicles the life cycle of Nicole and Charlie’s separation over 137 excruciating, beautiful minutes— so long as you’re aware that it was written and directed by Noah Baumbach, you’ll hardly be surprised by this sudden swerve into gloom. America’s poet laureate of marital and familial discord, Baumbach has devoted his career to exploring relationships—not just between couples, but also between parents and children, siblings, and friends—with a tricky combination of brutal honesty and wry comedy. Marriage Story is no exception; this is a film of lacerating insight and raw emotion. But it is also perhaps his most tender, least showy work (though Frances Ha may want a word). As ever, Baumbach refuses to sentimentalize his characters, but here he regards them with unprecedented empathy. In examining how two people break apart, he creates a sensation of togetherness. Read More

The Irishman: And I Think It’s Gonna Be a Long, Long Crime

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman"

In one of the most memorable scenes in Goodfellas, Joe Pesci’s character triumphantly arrives for a celebration in his honor, only to realize that he’s just walked into his own death. It’s a devastating rug-pull that presages the film’s slow bend from buoyant mafioso hangout joint to brittle human tragedy. The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s sweeping, lurching, ultimately moving new crime epic, is a bit like that scene writ large, but framed from a different perspective. It’s about the triggerman in that cold and empty room, and the paralyzing loneliness he suffers. Rather than focusing on the cathartic thrill of violence, this sprawling movie draws its power from aftermath—from what happens after the bullets leave the gun and the bodies hit the floor.

A solemn study of aging (and de-aging!), The Irishman announces itself as a monumental work, both in terms of its grand scope (Netflix’s tagline: “A lot can happen in a lifetime”) and its much-publicized 210-minute running time. Ambition is nothing new for Scorsese, and neither are gangsters. But while its bildungsroman arc and its fan-favorite cast inevitably recall Goodfellas and Casino, the director isn’t repeating himself here; instead, he’s reflecting. If anything, the mob movie that The Irishman most evokes is The Godfather Part II, given the way it refracts a career of savagery and crime through a prism of melancholy and loss. Read More

Velvet Buzzsaw: Killer Painting. What’s It Worth?

Rene Russo and Jake Gyllenhaal in "Velvet Buzzsaw"

The emperor’s clothes get ripped to shreds in Velvet Buzzsaw, an asinine satire of the modern art scene that paints its targets and its characters in crude, bloody strokes. Written and directed by Dan Gilroy (and distributed by Netflix), it imagines a world full of rubes and sharks, a corrupt ecosystem in which artists, dealers, and critics conspire and compete in their feverish efforts to defraud you, the guileless consumer. It’s a tale of sickly glamour; most of the people we meet in this ugly little movie are extremely wealthy, though their morals are as bankrupt as Gilroy’s themes.

As a satire, Velvet Buzzsaw is profoundly idiotic, but as a halfway-intentional comedy, it is not without its diversions. Chief among those is Jake Gyllenhaal, who in Gilroy’s Nightcrawler delivered the performance of his career as a gaunt, wild-eyed videographer who crept from TV newsrooms into your nightmares. His work here is less unsettling but no less entertaining, full of rococo flourishes that underline his zany commitment. His mania holds your attention even as the film around him burns to the ground. Read More

Roma: Maid in Mexico, Made with Beauty

A striking scene from Alfonso Cuarón's "Roma"

Early in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, two astronauts frantically attempt to propel themselves back to a docking station by way of a jetpack, their tiny white suits looking like stars that dot the infinite blackness of space. Early in Roma, Cuarón’s new film for Netflix, a man slowly pulls his car into a narrow garage, repeatedly rotating his wheels and pulling in his mirrors to avoid scraping the walls. As parking jobs go, the stakes here are rather less severe, given that the man is seeking to avoid minor property damage rather than trying to cheat death; it’s a scene about a Ford Galaxie, not, you know, the galaxy. But Cuarón’s camera captures the process with the same spooky intimacy, locking on the sedan’s boxy corners and bulky wheels as they swivel to and fro, searching for safety. The director’s craftsmanship never wavers, whether he’s chronicling explorers careening into space or cars rolling over dog shit.

In empirical terms, Roma is a smaller film than Gravity, Children of Men, or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; it doesn’t make heavy use of thriller tropes or special effects, and it doesn’t take place in dystopian or fantastical worlds where humanity’s very survival is at risk. But it shares with those movies a certain philosophical principle, the persistent belief that cinema is a tool for telling thorny, personal stories on a grand scale. In some ways, Roma is a low-key family drama, but if its narrative occasionally verges on mundane, its technique is never less than extraordinary. Read More

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: Their Lives Are in Pieces, and So Is the Movie

Tim Blake Nelson in the Coen Brothers' "Ballad of Buster Scruggs"

In one of the six vignettes that make up The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the new Western from Joel and Ethan Coen, a solitary prospector played by Tom Waits spends a good deal of time digging a series of holes near a river. As you watch his methodical work, it doesn’t take you all that long to discern his purpose; even if you struggle to fathom the particular mechanics of his strategy, it’s plain that this silent, grizzled man is searching for gold. But because these laborious digging scenes find the film at its least busy—note that this is another way of saying “most boring”—your mind is likely to wander, and to contemplate the potential thematic connections that must surely link the film’s narratively disparate episodes.

But how? In structuring The Ballad of Buster Scruggs as an anthology, the Coens have invited their audience to engage in a robust, somewhat maddening intellectual guessing game. Maybe the movie is about the tragic inevitability of death; this seems plausible, given that four of our six main characters die, while the other two do the killing. Maybe it’s about the inherent tension between the tantalizing promise of the Old West (manifest destiny!) and the cold reality of a lawless, nascent civilization. Maybe it’s about the perpetual collision between man’s insatiable greed—most everyone we meet craves more of something, be it money, glory, or respect—and his desire for stability and peace. Or maybe, just maybe, the vignettes don’t share any deeper meaning at all. Maybe those holes are just holes. Read More