Marriage Story is Baumbach's best and most ambitious film to date

Marriage Story (2019) is Noah Baumbach's best and most ambitious movie to date; it's a powerful drama about the breakup of a marriage (and family), very sad and disturbing throughout and painfully believable. I'm not sure that it's a balanced depiction of a break-up - in my view the wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johannson) is far less sympathetic that her spouse, the beleaguered Charlie (Adam Driver - is he in every movie this year, btw?) - and I wonder if female viewers find her more sympathetic than I did; it may be a gender thing. In essence, we meet this Brooklyn couple, and their 8-year-old son, as they've started the process of mediation to lead to what they believe will be a completely amicable divorce. But from the first scene we see the fractures, as they squabble in the mediator's office w/ Nicole in particular refusing to go along w/ the "assignment" (listing things you like about your spouse. We see eventually that she's taking the lead on the break-up; she feels her husband in self-centered and has stifled her career - yet she's no Nora (Doll's House): She is the lead actor in his theater company and is offered a lead role in a show bound from Broadway. We soon realize, or should, that there are about a hundred ways in which she could advance her acting/directing career w/out breaking up the marriage; there has to be another reason for her ire (Charlie's been relegated to sleeping on the couch for a year!), but Baumbach does not reveal any more of her story. The essence of the film is the complete impossibility of an amicable divorce. Nicole breaks faith with Charlie and hires an extremely aggressive divorce lawyer (Laura Dern), and Charlie has no choice but to follow suit, so to speak, and they're at each other's throats (again, Charlie gets more of our sympathy as he's clearly being pushed aside in his desire to share custody of their son and he's financially strapped while N relies on family wealth). The high (or low) point of the film is the scene in which N visits C in his sterile rental apt in LA (she has moved to LA w/ their son) as they begin to discuss matters peaceably and rationally and the discussion completely goes off the rails. In fact there are many great, and always sad, moments - including all the visits of both C and N to their attorneys. the courtroom scene near the end is a little formulaic and I think matters could have been wrapped a little more dexterously at the end - did we need the 2 musical #s? - bu all told it's a well-scripted and well-paced drama that will provoke a lot of thought and self-examination among many viewers.