Noah Baumbach's New York-to-Los-Angeles divorce drama. Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, and one of the most-disciplined character studies of the decade.
Brooklyn, contemporary. Charlie Barber is a successful theatre director; his wife Nicole, formerly a Hollywood actress, has been the lead in his theatre company for years. Nicole has accepted a Los Angeles TV role and moved with their young son Henry to her mother's house in California. Charlie initially treats the move as temporary; Nicole, with her sister Cassie's encouragement, hires Los Angeles divorce attorney Nora Fanshaw, and the relationship transitions from informal separation to contested divorce.
The film tracks the Barber divorce across roughly six months. Charlie hires two lawyers in succession — first the gentle, semi-retired Bert Spitz, then the aggressive Jay Marotta. The film's structural set piece is a roughly nine-minute argument in Charlie's empty Los Angeles rental apartment, in which Charlie and Nicole start with a calm conversation and escalate into one of the most-discussed marital-argument scenes in modern American cinema. The film closes on a tentative post-divorce equilibrium, with both Charlie and Nicole reading aloud to Henry the lists of things they love about each other that Nicole's therapist asked her to make at the film's opening.
Marriage Story opens with a structural device that the film uses to establish its emotional architecture. Charlie reads aloud a list of things he loves about Nicole; she reads aloud her list of things she loves about Charlie. The lists are voiceover; the visible footage is a montage of the couple's domestic life. The opening runs roughly six minutes.
The reveal is that the lists were prepared by Nicole's therapist as part of pre-mediation preparation, and that Nicole refused to read hers aloud when the time came. The opening, which the audience experienced as an affectionate marriage portrait, is in fact the documentation of a marriage that has, by the time the film opens, already ended in its participants' interior lives. The structural irony is the film's argument: the marriage was real, the love was real, the affection was real, and the relationship still failed.
The film's most-discussed single sequence is the argument in Charlie's empty Los Angeles rental apartment, roughly 100 minutes into the film. The scene runs approximately nine minutes. It opens with Charlie and Nicole speaking calmly about logistical matters and progressively escalates through specific grievances into a shouting match that closes with Charlie punching a wall and immediately apologising, then Nicole holding him while he cries.
The sequence is structurally important because it depicts what divorce actually produces — both parties carrying years of accumulated specific complaints that can be unleashed in a single conversation, both still capable of caring for the other in the immediate aftermath of the unleashing. The scene was shot mostly in one take by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson; the sequence required emotional commitment that most working acting scenes do not require. Both performers were nominated for Oscars partly on the basis of this scene.
Laura Dern's Nora Fanshaw — Nicole's Los Angeles divorce attorney — won Best Supporting Actress at the 2020 Oscars. The character is, in some sense, the film's antagonist; Nora is the figure who progressively converts the informal Barber separation into a contested legal proceeding. Dern plays the character with significant warmth — Nora is genuinely on Nicole's side, genuinely competent at her work, and also genuinely happy to escalate the legal stakes in ways that produce billable hours.
The performance has a famous monologue in which Nora explains the structural double-standard of contemporary divorce law — that mothers are expected to be perfect while fathers are excused for the smallest displays of involvement. The monologue runs roughly two minutes. It is, in working family-law circles, considered one of the most-accurate cinematic depictions of how American divorce attorneys explain the legal landscape to female clients. Dern's specific delivery has been quoted across legal-pedagogy contexts since the film's release.