I think it is nice that Noah Baumbach met and got close to Greta Gerwig in Spring of 2009 during the filming of Grenberg, when she was playing a woman who was having an affair with a older man in a film Baumback wrote. She's 25 and the male lead is 40 in the 2009 film. Except Baumbach was married during that year of close work. Maybe knowing this helps illuminate aspects of this "story" that are totally absent in the 2019 film.
When you are in the film business, as screenplay writer and gaining fame and power from a first couple of hit films, and you are getting a divorce about a year after "meeting" and working "very closely" with an actress who is much younger than you or your wife -- while your wife is pregnant -- and then divorcing your wife -- perhaps it is a good idea to write a film which that ignores those inconvenient facts. I guess. I mean if you got a typewriter why not whitewash what is transparently proffered as your story to make it about mutual alienation and not something more tawdry (and more typical behavior of men in Hollywood).
But I'm sorry: as an audience member I don't want to be lied to. Therein lies the problem with Marriage Story. It was an opportunity to be honest yet it is a profoundly dishonest film. In fact it is deceptive narcissism of a very high order. Exploring the truth would have taken courage and would have been brilliant and real drama.
Sure we all lie to ourselves, but frankly I don't want to hear, or watch others' lies about their marriagse. An unreliable narrator is one thing, it is a good plot device, but not when sold as a reliable one.
OK on the positive side half of the acting, specifically by Johannson, is great. Adam Driver seems sedate, but he is ok in this.
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