Barber vs. Barber

Film: Marriage Story
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on the new internet machine.

I’m not going to pull any punches at the start of this review so that you’re not left in any suspense. If you’ve seen Kramer vs. Kramer, there’s not a lot of new territory for you when it comes to Marriage Story. At one point in the movie, a divorce lawyer says something along the lines of criminal lawyers see bad people at their best and divorce lawyers see good people at their worst. This is a movie about a divorce, so the audience gets to fill in for the role of the divorce lawyers in this case. Worse, I’m not so sure that these are good people.

So yes, this is a story of divorce. It’s worth noting that one of the last times Noah Baumbach (who wrote and directed this) delved into the topic of divorce, the movie we got was the absolutely gutting The Squid and the Whale. It’s more of the same this time, only this time, there’s only one child, he’s younger, and the story is going to move between New York and L.A. At its heart, though, this is a story about two people doing everything they can to hurt each other emotionally and mentally. It’s unappealing at best. There’s a reason I’ve waited this long to watch it, and there’s a reason I saved one movie from last year’s Oscars to watch after this, so I didn’t end my 2019 Oscar watching on something that made me want to pull out my own spine.

Children of Divorce

Film: The Squid and the Whale
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

This is going to be painful. I’m a child of divorce and The Squid and the Whale is about divorce. It’s not just that, though. This is a movie that hits home for me in a lot of respects. The film is a mere 81 minutes long and it took me all day to get through because I needed to stop and process it. My parents’ divorce started when I was 15, so it was multiple decades ago, but The Squid and the Whale hit me very hard in a couple of places and erased those years very quickly. Not in a good way, but in a real way.

Frances Ha

Film: Frances Ha
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.

The goal of a movie review is, at least in part, to define the movie in question. With something like Frances Ha, that’s a difficult proposition, because Frances Ha is at least in part indefinable. This is a film that needs to be felt more than understood consciously. It takes on the entirety of the hipster generation, and the fact that the hopes and dreams of that generation are already fading, leaving yet again a collection of 20-somethings in exactly the same position of the previous generations—we’re all convinced that we’re important and going to change the world, and we’re going to do this by essentially standing still.

All of this takes place through the lens of Frances (Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the script with director Noah Baumbach). Frances wants to be a professional modern dancer, and is in the way that most people who want that profession are—she’s an understudy/trainee for a dance company and she teaches ballet to children. Her world is wrapped tightly with her friend and roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner). Frances even breaks up with her boyfriend Dan (Michael Esper) when he asks her to move in with him, opting instead to stay with Sophie.