Marriage Story

A perfect movie in every way. For as cold and harsh as the subject matter, I’ve always been impressed at how warm Baumbach makes it feel.

I would love to give Baumbach truth serum and ask if he felt like he mastered “his thing” with Marriage Story & that led to his pivot to trying to make something at a bigger and grander scale. This one feels like the perfect culmination of his first 8 films and you can’t help but feel like he’s been running from it ever since. Maybe he figured he couldn’t make a small and intimate drama that would top this? Or maybe it got too easy and he could do this in his sleep? Either way, I can’t help but think it was an intentional choice to push the limits on his comfort zone & scale up for his next two (and who knows past that) films. And while I don’t think his two forays into “scaling up” are bad per se, it’s just that he’s yet to capture the “magic in a bottle”that you get when his writing meets his signature slice of life small story.

I really hope that we don’t look back over his career and point to this as being the moment he was at the peak of his powers, but if it is, it’s a higher high than 95% of filmmakers will ever have.