Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/30/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, December 30, 2019

Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019)

Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019)

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, Alan Alda, Azhy Robertson, Wallace Shawn, Julie Hagerty, Merritt Wever, Martha Kelly. Screenplay: Noah Baumbach. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Jade Healy. Film editing: Jennifer Lame. Music: Randy Newman.

The enthralling performances of Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver give Marriage Story its solid substance, and Noah Baumbach's direction of them provides its estimable style. He lets Johansson deliver Nicole's indictment to her lawyer of Charlie's faults in a single-take monologue, and has the confrontation of Nicole and Charlie in his L.A. apartment build in a slow crescendo that ends with Charlie slamming his fist into the wall, then collapsing on the floor to be comforted by her. But my favorite scene is probably the visit of the court-appointed examiner to Charlie's apartment. She's drab and diminutive, towered over by the hulking Driver, but we sense how much power she holds over Charlie -- as does he, constantly putting his foot wrong no matter how he tries not to. Driver is simply wonderful in a scene that concludes with Charlie cutting himself in an attempt to defuse Henry's embarrassing revelation that he plays a trick with a knife. The trick goes wrong and Charlie, bleeding profusely, assures the examiner that it's really nothing, ushers her out of the door, then rushes to the kitchen to try to stanch the flow of blood, frantically applying band-aids and unreeling a lot of paper towels before falling to the floor, almost catatonic with chagrin. It's a hugely accomplished movie, with some faults, I think. Wallace Shawn's vain old actor, blathering on about his Tony award and his past accomplishments is a caricature, as is Julie Hagerty's dithery turn as Nicole's mother. The lawyers are too easily slotted into their roles as villains, spoiling Nicole and Charlie's plans for a friendly divorce. Only the skill of Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, and Alan Alda keeps their characters from descending to the level of cliché, though Dern's Nora echoes her role as Renata in Big Little Lies a bit more than I'd like. But the intelligence of the central performances outshines all of the film's missteps.