I'm not going to say much about Marriage Story, except that it is a not-loose-enough remake of Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale (2005), with fewer children at stake, and is made as though D.W. Griffith had never lived. I just want to let readers of this blog know that I do watch some contemporary films, even if I usually end up regretting it. Marriage Story, unlike Baumbach's earlier film, has only one child at stake, as Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson -- a theatre director and an actress -- battle it out for a divorce and the custody of their child, played by Azhy Robertson. The Robertson character gets short shrift indeed: he is supposed to be (I think) about eight years old and has trouble reading, for which he gets no help from either parent. Johansson and Driver both hire sleazy divorce lawyers (which they had originally agreed not to do) and fight it out in court and in person. Why this film is called Marriage Story instead of Divorce Story I don't understand, since only the divorce is shown; perhaps Baumbach thinks divorce inevitably follows marriage. If one wants to see a married couple battle on personal and professional grounds with wit and intelligence I recommend the 1949 film Adam's Rib; it stars Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, was directed by George Cukor and written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin; it's available on DVD and shows up fairly often on Turner Classic Movies.
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