I’ll say right off the bat, I didn’t want to see this movie. It looked like a combination of a Rom Com and a drama about the destruction of a relationship and boy howdy I have no interest in either of those things. But it’s up for several Oscars, and a lot of people seemed to really like it, and it’s one of the few Oscar-nominated films on Netflix, so I decided to be a grown up and watch it before making up my mind about it.
Turns out, it’s exactly what I though it’d be, full of awkward fights and the worst, most heartwrenching kind of mediocre day to day stuff that people have to get through when their life as they know it is ending. I disliked the hell out of it. And yet? I absolutely see why it’s been nominated.
It’s not as simple as not being in love anymore.
Minor spoilers below, I’ll try not to give away the biggest plot points or the ending, but you’ll be able to read a lot between the lines.
First off, before you say anything, I know I didn’t go into this movie with the best mind set, so a lot of my negative opinions are my own fault. (And I don’t think this kind of movie bothers most people as much as it does me, so your mileage will vary.) But it does make the parts that impressed me more impressive, because I was so dead-set on disliking it.
I don’t have a review so much as a random string of thoughts, since I was jotting down notes as they occurred to me, and they’re a little disjointed because I took three hours to watch a 2.5-hour movie, since I kept stopping for breaks when the fights got too uncomfortable.
I was surprised when I realized that the only flashbacks in this movie are in the first ten minutes. After that, we’re really starting at the ending. We don’t see the painful months that led up to Charlie and Nicole deciding to split up. We just see ten or fifteen minutes of a beautiful marriage, and then jump right into the mediator’s office as they discuss their divorce. It really is what all the plugs and posters said: it begins at the end. The marriage is already dead, what we’re seeing is the autopsy.
We hear about the end of the relationship a lot, through stories they each tell their friends, family, and lawyers, and I always enjoy that: it gives you a little bit of a remove from the conflict, hearing the stories instead of seeing them as they happen, and they’re so beautifully told.
Scarlett Johansson does this breathtakingly amazing monologue as she tells her lawyer (oh hi Laura Dern!) about her marriage. There’s so few cuts, so much of it is this long, unbroken stream of raw emotion. And it’s not like she’s talking about things that are either horrific or amazing, it’s just the normal daily routine of someone who took forever to realize how unhappy she was, and it’s just mesmerizing, you can’t look away.
Adam Driver’s chance to shine is watching him slog through the soul-crushing business of handling a divorce he never wanted, the awkward awfulness of talking to lawyers who tell you the worst case scenario just to make you panic, and you’re trying to be with your kid but he’s eight with all the annoying single-mindedness of an eight-year-old, as you try to balance your work on one coast with your family on the other but you still have to find a lawyer and where the hell is the money coming from again?
Watching Charlie’s search for lawyers and seeing him have to choose between the organized, successful, cut-throat attorney who’s a total asshole (hey there Ray Liotta), and the caring, sympathetic, lovely human being who is really, really terrible at his job (hi there Alan Alda, I had no idea you were in this and boy were you amazing)…it reminds me what a friend of my sister said about the doctors she’d worked with. How the best surgeons tend to be jerks with rotten bedside manners, and the nice, friendly ones who make you laugh are probably going to leave a sponge inside you. It’s probably like that with lawyers, I’m guessing.
Driver has two other moments that really stand out to me. One is the last fight he has with Nicole, and speaking of raw emotion, wow. They were both fantastic (in that awful, cringey, “I’m watching someone being emotionally flayed alive” kind of way) but he just blew the doors off the place, it was astonishing.
The other moment is a song he sings. If you believe imdb it was done in one take, and if you’re a fan of Sondheim and those kind of blisteringly difficult chord changes (or someone like me who had no idea Driver was that musical) you’re going to love that scene.
And there’s so many other neat, subtle cinematography choices. Having Nicole sit on the subway next to the sign that says “Do not lean on door” was clever, as was the Greek Chorus we had with the theater troupe (there’s tons of nods to classic theater all throughout the film, but I loved the troupe.) And Randy Newman wrote the score, and it was lovely.
But yes this movie is exhausting. From the fights to the awkward failure of a Halloween to the vicious courtroom scenes to the incompetent lawyer to the mother with boundary issues to the unsexy sex scene in the car to the fights to the fights to the fights. But there’s some sweet moments here and there. And they do nothing to make it less exhausting, honestly.
It’s nothing I’d want to watch a second time, and I’d be very annoyed if it won an Oscar. Except, you know, in terms of cinematography, directing, music and acting, it deserves every award it was nominated for. I KNOW SHUT UP.