Jakub Flasz’s review published on Letterboxd:
It doesn’t really take a genius to identify two defining aspects of Noah Baumbach’s filmmaking career. He has been consistently drawing from autobiographical experiences, the most prominent, direct and discussed ad nauseam example of which would be his parents’ divorce in The Squid And The Whale. Though, it has to be noted that within the landscape of these inspirations he has repeatedly revisited the theme of a family (or a relationship) in crisis in Margot At The Wedding, While We’re Young and The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected); this is the first aspect. The second one has to do with Baumbach’s filmmaking style being – perhaps involuntarily at times – permeated with pieces of homage to Woody Allen. The reason I consciously used the word ‘involuntarily’ is because it is possible, though in my opinion unlikely, that the stylistic symmetry between Baumbach and Allen is a by-product of their symmetrical upbringing. After all, he is also a New Yorker who draws from his own experiences, writes himself into characteristically neurotic intellectuals and drops them into scenarios that are simultaneously very simple and surprisingly complex; manufactured yet relatable. Therefore, I have always considered this parallel to hold water and maybe occasionally deployed it as a means of criticizing Baumbach’s work, because I believe that a conscious attempt at emulating anything is most often asymptotic to the original – it can never equate it in quality nor surpass it. Marriage Story proves it is possible after all.
Woody Allen has always idolized Ingmar Bergman and often referred to him as the foremost inspiration for his own work. From Annie Hall to Love And Death, Hannah And Her Sisters, Husbands And Wives and more, he has consistently saturated his stories with Bergman-esque detached cruelty needed to balance his comedic proclivities and thus give his movies a characteristic bittersweet aftertaste. By extension, Baumbach’s work has always seemed as though it was trying to tap into the same groove, but it always ended up drawing from Allen as opposed to Allen’s source of inspiration. While still generally effective, Baumbach’s movies have always remained somehow derivative as a result because they were essentially playing telephone with Bergman’s work. This time Baumbach succeeded in reaching through Allen and connecting directly into the source, thus turning Marriage Story into his own personal piece of homage to Scenes From A Marriage; in fact, he even included a little tip of a hat to Bergman in one scene where Adam Driver’s Charlie looks at framed photographs on the wall and the camera focuses for a second on a commemorative newspaper clipping of a review of Charlie’s and Nicole’s (Scarlett Johansson) stage adaptation of said miniseries-turned-film!
And I have to say that Baumbach really pulled it off. Marriage Story is an absolutely haunting, heart-rending masterpiece that triumphs immeasurably thanks to the filmmaker’s ability to ride the line between his typical Allen-esque approach to writing, that can be too loquacious, verbose and literary for its own good, and the type of writing this story required, which is pre-eminently rooted in an attempt to mirror real life as closely as possible. As a result, the film is simply teeming with absolutely unforgettable scenes where both Johansson and Driver were allowed enough space to spread their wings and fought – like boxers in the ring – for stage supremacy using their whole acting arsenal, from small character nuances that are really easy to miss all the way to grand physical exchanges with fists going through walls, tears streaming down cheeks and barrages of venomous words.
Suffice it to say that Marriage Story truly succeeds in deconstructing the painful process of a marriage crumbling apart, which Alan Alda’s character likens to dealing with somebody dying without a dead body ever making an appearance. In fact, Baumbach rightly applies the Kübler-Ross model commonly referred to as the five stages of grief as a structural skeleton for the characters’ arcs. The surgical meticulousness with which the filmmaker progresses through all these stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – is in my opinion what truly gives the story its strong Bergman-esque aroma that simultaneously unsettles the audience and compels them to see this crisis through together with Nicole, Charlie, and little Henry who was invariably trapped in the crossfire between warring adults.
This is why Marriage Story is such a tour de force on all fronts. Not only is this film such a devastating study of how the lives of two people, thus far intertwined into a tight double helix of responsibilities and emotional interdependence, come apart in torturous pain that may have also been at least partially inspired by Baumbach’s own experience of divorcing his first wife, it is predominantly a triumphant ode to one of Bergman’s grandest achievements. This effectively means that Baumbach has finally punched through the ceiling of being a low-rent Woody Allen. This film puts him in the same league with Allen’s Husbands And Wives, Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight and Robert Benton’s Kramer Vs Kramer as a masterful example of dissecting human relationships and packaging this process into a story that is relatable, unsettling, compelling, honest and artistically accomplished.