Couple and Family Psychoanalysis 11(1) 94–98 (2021)

ARTS REVIEWS

Marriage Story, directed by Noah Baumbach, 2019, USA.

Reviewed by Viveka Nyberg

In this film we meet Nicole and Charlie (Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver) and their eight-year-old son Henry. We soon learn that the couple are divorc- ing and we follow the story of their marriage breaking up. The parents both work in the theatre in New York, but Nicole has been offered work in Los Angeles which means she can move back into her family home with her mother and sister. Here the viewer is presented with the ostensible reason for Nicole’s desire to leave Charlie. She feels she has been sidelined by him for many years; that he has failed to respond to her wishes; and that he has selfishly followed his own desires, including having an affair with a colleague, whilst not acting on her wish to move back to California. Nicole believes she has “got smaller” in the relationship. Charlie is baffled by this, asserting that he thought he had been pursuing career goals in both their interests. One of the themes of the film emerges early: how can individual desires and wishes be reconciled with the requirement for compromise implied in being in an intimate relationship with another person? There is a brief visit to a male, couple therapist. It’s brief because Nicole walks out of the session, experiencing the therapist as siding with her hus- band. This may be because Nicole feels vulnerable and guilty as the instigator of the divorce, and she might carry a particular sensitivity to a patriarchal world that she maintains has impinged on her desires. Alternatively, it may be that something about the couple dynamic is swaying the therapist’s mind, making it difficult for him to maintain a “couple state of mind”:

Holding a couple state of mind is important so that without having to spell it out, the couple has an experience of there being room for both of them …. (Morgan, 2019, p. 39)

Nicole’s abandonment of the therapy may possibly also relate to the therapist appearing slightly “tone-deaf” to what the couple is bringing. He insists on beginning the session with what he calls “positives”, asking the couple to recall how they fell in love, whilst ignoring the couple’s profound distress. It is as if he is set on following his own consultation and assessment pro forma, while blind to the couple’s state of mind. Both principal characters in the film present as equally self-absorbed. Neither Nicole nor Charlie are much interested in the other’s perspective. It’s not until the final third of the film that one parent wonders what might be best for their son, Henry, or indeed what his wishes might be. Ironically, it is Henry that the couple ultimately end up fighting over in the ensuing divorce proceedings.

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The film describes well how a couple with good intentions can easily deceive themselves that a divorce can be managed with minimum upset, as if their lives should continue as before, with forbearance and acceptance. Yet the film illustrates how the couple nevertheless find themselves flooded with primitive affect, ferociously blaming and raging at each other. Although this is not presented as a high-conflict couple divorcing (Shmueli, 2012), the couple do have an extremely charged argument. Any erosion of identity leading to a pathological regression is temporary, however, and the couple are seen to recover their senses and equilibrium. The momentum driving the quest for change is Nicole’s experience of having become an adjunct to Charlie’s life, that her voice has become unheard. From a feminist perspective, she deserves respect for her courage in taking her fate in her own hands, rather than remaining in a relationship where she feels unable to develop her talent. Nicole seems to recognise that there is no further room for development within the marriage. This would seem to be the point where there could have been some recognition of shared affect; the shared sadness that the marriage no longer could sustain them both emotionally. The couple’s differences have become too great to be contained in the relationship. As an audience, we are told very little about Charlie’s background, but his family experience of alcohol and violence is referred to and this is per- haps presented as an explanation for his rather rigid defensiveness and apparent inability to behave as if his wife is an equal partner. Instead we see more of Nicole’s rather idealised family setting in Los Angeles. In contrast to her husband, Nicole has a family that, however ambivalently, provide accommodation, emotional support, and childcare. At different points in the film, the couple are represented by three different divorce lawyers and the viewer can appreciate their varying responses to the couple’s dilemmas. It illustrates how a divorce lawyer can make use of their clients’ confused feelings, creating a powerful but selective one-sided and adversarial narrative. As expected from a Hollywood film, the ending is upbeat and sentimental. Nicole’s career takes off, she meets a new partner, and Charlie decides to move to LA to keep contact with his son. By the end, sadness and mourning for the lost marriage appears to have transported the couple away from their grievances to a shared emotional place, where Henry is allowed to take centre stage. Perhaps some of the couple’s emotional suffering could have been avoided if they could have accessed some form of a “parenting together” service (Hertzmann et al., 2017), where they would have been encouraged to hold Henry’s needs in mind from the outset. The film’s narrative is engaging and, at times, moving and the performances are persuasive. However, the characters seem to inhabit a rather limited contextual environment, where we have very little real sense of the wider society that they inhabit. Perhaps this is meant to illustrate the mindset of an unhappy couple struggling to find a way forward. Nicole and Charlie are pre- occupied with finding a solution to their own unique unhappiness and have 96 PERRINE MORAN few resources to look beyond the immediate parameters of their personal situation and their individual quests for personal and professional fulfilment.

References

Hertzmann, L., Abse, S., Target, M., Glausius, K., Nyberg, V., & Lassri, D. (2017). Mentalisation-based therapy for parental conflict – parenting together; an inter- vention for parents in entrenched post-separation disputes. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 31(2): 195–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/02668734.2017. 1320685 Morgan, M. (2019). A Couple State of Mind: Psychoanalysis of Couples and the Tavistock Relationships Model. Routledge: London. Shmueli, A. (2012). Working therapeutically with high conflict divorce. In: A. Balfour, M. Morgan & C. Vincent (Eds.), How Couple Relationships Shape our World: Clinical Practice, Research, and Policy Perspectives (pp. 137–158). London: Karnac.