It’s very rare that I’m just at a loss for words after seeing a movie, but it’s been a few days now since I watched Marriage Story, and I’m still not really sure what to say about it. The movie kind of knocked me on my ass if I’m being completely honest. I’m not sure what I was expecting when I decided to watch it, but it certainly wasn’t the completely gripping and emotional ride that Marriage Story is.

We see right off the bat in Marriage Story that the title is actually a bit of a misnomer. It might have been appropriate to call it Divorce Story, because that’s more of what the actual plot is. The opening of the movie gives narrations from the married couple, Charlie and Nicole, about what they love about each other. It’s immediately after this that we find out that they’re getting a divorce. Without going too far into plot specifics, the situation soon turns into a complete mess, as the couple has a child together, and Charlie and Nicole are now living on separate sides of the country and getting lawyers involved. I read a description of the movie that it’s about “a marriage falling apart, and a family staying together,” and that’s an appropriate way to describe this movie.

While the movie does a great job of not taking sides and showing both characters with a lot of strengths and faults, we tend to follow Charlie a bit more throughout the movie. We begin by feeling worse for Nicole, as she gives a monologue to another character about how their marriage fell apart, and we see that it’s because she was unhappy due to Charlie’s actions, and that Charlie never took steps to fix that. One of Charlie’s biggest downfalls is that he’s very self-absorbed, and so he doesn’t seem to think there’s as much of a problem as there actually is. He tends to think the situation isn’t as dire as it is and that it’ll fix itself eventually, and so we follow a lot of his journey in seeing how his marriage truly is ending. This is where the beauty of the movie really starts to take form. It becomes apparent that while Charlie might have been the more responsible party in the marriage falling apart, Nicole is the more ruthless one in the divorce proceedings and is more at fault for failing to make things amicable going forward. I felt compassion for both of these characters for different reasons, and I think it’s a real achievement that Marriage Story is able to balance this.

I think this movie deserves a ton of praise, which is why it’s so frustrating that I find it hard to articulate how great it is. I can go on about the usual stuff about how great the acting and directing is, but to me that’s a given. I think the highest praise I can give Marriage Story is how it made me feel.

I watched the movie with my girlfriend, and when it was over we just held each other for a long time. If I’m being completely honest, it’s the kind of movie that scared the shit out of me. It felt so real, and seeing how messy things can get in a divorce like this was just horrifying. It made me scared to ever get divorced, and it broke my heart to see such a loving marriage fall to pieces in the way that it did. After watching the movie, my girlfriend and I both echoed how we hope we never have to go through what these characters did, and so it reaffirmed how badly we want things to work out for us, because the consequences can otherwise be disastrous.

4.5/5