Film

Marriage Story

Name: Marriage Story
Genre: Drama
Released: 2019
Cast: Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta

Noah Baumbach's clinical, tender autopsy of a marriage ending — a director and actress navigate custody, lawyers, and the strange choreography of unbinding two lives. It's funny in the way real pain often is, then suddenly not. Driver and Johansson give performances so exact they sting. For anyone who's loved someone and later had to divide the furniture.

TMDb rating

7.7

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The original custody-battle heartbreaker, and the film Marriage Story is quietly in conversation with — a clueless dad learning to parent under duress still lands hard.

But Its gender politics feel dated now, and the courtroom melodrama is broader than Baumbach's more surgical approach.

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Cuts between a marriage's giddy beginning and its exhausted end, so you watch the same two people fall in love and fall apart in the same ninety minutes.

But Gosling and Williams commit so hard it's genuinely punishing — there's little of Baumbach's wit to soften the blow.

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Baumbach's earlier, rawer divorce film, told through the eyes of kids caught in the middle — his own family history barely disguised.

But Meaner and less generous to both parents than Marriage Story; nobody here gets a redemptive arc.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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Same anatomy-of-a-collapse structure Baumbach is clearly working from — private arguments as the whole drama, decades before Marriage Story arrived at the same idea in a different format.

Bergman's six-part Swedish miniseries basically invented the genre — two people talking a marriage to death across a single apartment table, in unbearable close-up.

But It's long, subtitled, and almost entirely two people arguing indoors — no courtroom, no plot engine, just talk.

Revolutionary Road2008

DiCaprio and Winslet as a couple suffocating inside 1950s suburban conformity — the same forensic interest in how a marriage's cracks widen under pressure.

But Bleaker and angrier throughout, with none of Marriage Story's flashes of dark comedy to relieve the tension.

Husbands and Wives1992

Woody Allen's jittery, handheld dissection of two marriages collapsing at once, shot like a documentary crew wandered into someone's actual breakup.

But Allen's own biography hangs uncomfortably over the film now, which can make it hard to watch on its own terms.

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A different shape of family under strain — two mothers, their kids, and a sperm-donor father who complicates everything — with the same interest in love curdling under pressure.

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An Iranian couple's divorce unravels into a moral thriller involving class, religion, and a lie that spirals — proof the genre travels well across cultures.

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The Descendants2011

George Clooney's marriage is already ending when the film starts, forcing him to reckon with who his wife really was — funny, sad, very Hawaiian.

But Considerably softer and more sentimental; the wound here is grief-adjacent rather than the live combat of an active divorce.

Two for the Road1967

Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn's marriage told out of order across several road trips, charting how a couple's jokes and rhythms curdle over the years.

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51 Birch Street2006no page yet

The same forensic urge to understand exactly how a marriage's private mythology cracked, but with no actors, no script — just a son excavating his own parents' divorce.

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Same custody-of-the-furniture, custody-of-the-friends mechanics, played as farce instead of tragedy — proof the material can curdle into either register depending on who's directing.

Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner turn a house-splitting divorce into gleeful, escalating warfare — slapstick with real venom underneath.

But It's broad black comedy where Marriage Story is careful and restrained — some will find the escalation cartoonish rather than cathartic.