When Nicole (Johansson) meets Nora (Dern), she's given the opportunity to articulate her feelings and work through the reasons why she wants to divorce her husband. Baumbach gives her an attentive audience, not just through Dern's (comically) overly earnest Nora, but through a long, uninterrupted shot that gives Nicole the opportunity for extended monologue. It registers as theatrical, a one-woman show.

In contrast when Charlie (Driver) first meets with his eventual attorney Ted (Liotta), rapid cuts jump from Ted and…

Round 2 screening with my mother, who loved it. 

A second watch did reaffirm my belief that the critical conversation around this was shy and lazy in its unanimous praise. It’s a sweet little film that I relate to in a lot of ways, but it’s also profoundly muddled, its sweeping sentimentality at times simplistic and unearned (those slo-mo shots are so laughably random). 

I write about this in my review for THE A.V.  CLUB, and again in my appraisal…