Marraige Story (dir. Noah Baumbach)

When I was younger and I read stories or watched a movie, I always wanted people to end on a happy note. I desired togetherness and love like there was no other way to be. For me, a story had to be happy, people had to get along and things had to make sense, in a happy cordial way of sense-making. If a story didn’t go that way, I’d declare it to be bad because well, it wasn’t how it was supposed to be in my world. 

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But lately, for the past few years, I have realized that I stopped anticipating happy endings. I guess, in a very pessimistic way of a postmodern beingness – one that’s loaded with existential and nihilistic concerns where young-ins always find themselves asking why and eventually giving up on the answers and accepting life in its senseless ways, my okay-ness with unhappy endings have become realized.

‘Marriage Story’ was something like that. The film opens on a rather romantic note, which sweeps you off your feet with showers of endearing compliments. Compliments, I say because that’s how these notes feel, like love notes, until you realize that they are not. The scene actually starts on a separation meeting-leading up to a divorce.

The film is rather real, almost in a painful reality of postmodern relationship way. The film’s narrative is as fragmented as life is. There are disagreements, indecisiveness, renegotiations, frustrations and realizations which surround the relationship of Nicole and Charlie. The film’s narrative, like their decisions and opinions, changes itself repeatedly. It’s fragmented and keeps things real. It muses on the painful surreal moments, on the feelings of being ripped-open and broken down on the floor in the middle of the day.

It doesn’t present a simple narrative because like the real life, nothing happens in a ‘said and done’ way. The incoherence parallels what a life after a separation-decision is like. You get lost in the ways a person was when you fell in the love with the first time and countlessly and continuously try to convince yourself to find your way back again. But just like real life, that doesn’t happen. The characters eventually get divorced and move on. Things get smoother and trick-n-treating doesn’t have to happen twice for their son. They learn cordiality and affection, in a ‘I could grab you and kiss you right now if I could, but we’ve finally reached this place and I am too scared to take a chance’ kind of way.

But I did hope for a good ending, at least for the sake of Charlie and Nicole’s love which lingers in the air, thick as a knife, throughout the movie. It’s one life. Screw the past, screw the efforts and excruciating pain of divorce and the separation journey because if you could gather 20 seconds of deep courage to rip the walls apart for your love and your family, you should. It’s only one life and a precious love, you know. How could you let anything come between it, let alone yourself?

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