"Marriage Story" is not a good movie

[Note: My original post misspelled "Story" in the title. I've corrected that error on 7/5/2020]

[Spoiler alerts: I reveal key plot details in "Marriage Story."]

"A Marriage Story," starring Adam Driver and Scarlet Johansson, documents the divorce process a couple and their son go through. The husband is an up and coming New York theater director. The wife is an actor who may like to direct.

I did not like "A Marriage Story," but I'm not sure why. I enjoyed it while watching it. But the movie as a whole left me with mixed feelings, and not in the way that a movie about divorce is supposed to leave me with mixed feelings. I felt that the movie wanted me to like and care about the main characters but that the main characters were unlikable, even on the movie's terms. Johansson and Driver each has legitimate grievances against their spouse and the way their marriage has played out. Maybe those grievances are even divorce-worthy.

But the characters don't seem to care about anything other than themselves. They don't seem to care about their son. The films creators don't seem to care about their son, either. He's a prop in a "children are the real victims of divorce" sermon, but even that sermon, as true as it is, falls flat. We don't see either the father or mother make any decisions for the interests of their son. Instead, they pursue their own interests and by the end their son seems to be adequately happy with the new way of doing things. We don't know why or how, we just know, to paraphrase the summary Netflix gives us, they're now a family coming together after it has fallen apart.

There's also a ridiculous scene where Driver's character sings what is probably a movie or theatre classic. (The--mostly fawning--reviews of the film I've read so far say that it's a Sondheim song.) It comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere. Its function seems to be to tell us that Driver's character is suffering emotional pain. As the old adage goes, the film should show, not tell, us that type of thing.

One success of the film is Alan Alda's character. He plays the husband's first lawyer. As a lawyer, he is appropriately expensive (requiring a $10,000 retainer), but he has his client's interest at heart and realizes that going for the jugular in the divorce proceeding doesn't serve his client or his client's son very well. Alda further realizes that divorce laws, as inconvenient as they are for Adam Driver's character, were designed to help women who's exes skip out on child support.

That's a commentary on the upper-class bias in the film. That bias goes over the heads of the characters and maybe even the heads of the show's creators. One challenge the film faces is to make the audience care about people who in real life would look down on them, with jokes and tsk-tsk's about culturally insensitive philistines or inhabitants of flyover country who "probably voted for Trump anyway." (My words, not theirs.) No matter how well-done the film, that challenge would be there regardless. I'm not sure it's even possible to overcome that challenge completely. But the film, with the exception of Alda's observation, doesn't seem to try, and the film's creators don't seem to even acknowledge it's a challenge.

Should you see it? Well, if you have Netflix anyway, it's probably worth spending the two hours or so to see if you agree with me. But I wouldn't recommend going out of your way.