This film review was shortlisted for the preliminary round of the 4th Shenjiao Chinese Film Critic Competition "Tianhuatian Film Critics Award" and "Houlang Film Academy Award". If you need to reprint, please indicate the source and contact the author himself.
There are many movies with marriage as the theme, and many of them are excellent works. The film "Marriage Story" produced by the streaming media company Netflix and directed by Noah Baumbach can be called such an excellent "marriage movie". However, its excellence seems to only stay at the level of "quality", and it lacks the sublimation towards "greatness". In other words, "Marriage Story" is a quality book, but not a great masterpiece.
One of the highlights of this film is the emotional expressiveness of the actors, which even constitutes the core of the "quality" of the film. At the same time, this also directly affects the narrative mode of the film - parallel and collinear alternate narratives. Whether it is the parallel expansion of the separated spaces of the husband and wife, or the prominence of the tension when the spaces of the two sides overlap, Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver have both made full and appropriate interpretations of the characters and psychological emotions they play. Deduction - its sufficiency lies in the explicit expressive power (direct expression, catharsis or explosion of emotions) in the collinear narrative, and its appropriateness lies in the implicit expressive power in the parallel narrative (the indirect expression, inhibition or forbearance of emotions) .
Secondly, the director's control over the rhythm of the film can be described as proficient, which is mainly reflected in the combination of the fast and slow rhythm of the film-fast cuts and long shots appear successively in the same scene segment, which not only uses the former to dispatch the audience's attention to different elements in the film, And form a formalized portrayal of the inner world of the characters in the film; the latter reserves sufficient and challenging presentation space for the actors, and at the same time gives the audience a moment of "gazing" (of course, this also depends on the actor's own acting skills. Support, so that the characters in the film can and enough "be stared at"). In addition, the director's handling of many places is so delicate and straight to the heart. Let's take an example (see Figure 1): At the end of the film, Charlie is reading a letter from his (former) wife Nicole in his son's room, and Nicole later relies on Listening quietly at the door frame of the room: at this moment, the lens with shallow depth of field focuses on Charlie reading the letter, while Nicole at the door frame always maintains a blurred "virtual focus" - such a lens design, realistic It’s almost brutal—we are as moved by this heartfelt letter as the characters, but at the same time, the separation of focus clearly suggests to us that Charlie and Nicole are indeed no longer in the same space. , in the same world, there is indeed no room for redemption between them.
Finally, the film deals with various elements—the judicial process of divorce and guardianship (the participation and confrontation of lawyers, the struggle for guardianship), gender issues (feminist color), differences between the east and the west, etc. Appropriately, the combination of these elements from the real background has added a lot of "common sense but not often known" reality dimensions to the film, enhancing the film's resonance with the audience and the realistic meaning of the film itself. At the same time, the whole film runs through a bright and even comedic narrative style, which further (on the basis of star actors and streaming platforms) becomes more marketable, in other words, more popular.
The above three major parts roughly constitute the main reason why "Marriage Story" has excellent quality and is a high-quality work. However, as stated at the outset, the film does have limitations that make it a great masterpiece:
The first is the level of the theme of the film. The film's treatment of the theme of "marriage dilemma" is limited to an eventual level. In other words, the unfolding logic of its theme is a concrete causal relationship. This of course has its rationality (considering public acceptance and market fitness) and inevitability (the actual marriage breakup or "disenchantment" process is always accompanied by a specific event), but this puts the marriage in the film. Difficulties consciously or unconsciously lead to a resultant product caused by the negligence of a specific event, rather than a causeless, fatalistic, metaphysical problem of life;
Second, the film's final ending has an American optimism-style relief and fulfillment. The emotional tension that has developed with the whole film is stubbornly warmed by such a relieved ending, and instead the emotions are placed. In other words, this is an emotionally closed-loop ending, which seems to give The audience conveys a feeling that "the event was/is resolved in the end". Here I would like to take two other films about marital difficulties for a horizontal discussion on the ending: Yang Dechang's "The Terrorist" and Asghar Farhadi's "A Separation". For the ending of the movie, I will divide it into two categories here: the ending of the movie’s events and the ending of the movie’s emotions – the former involves whether the plot content of the movie ushered in an open continuation or a complete ending; the latter Then the thematic emotions about the film are placed or suspended at the end of the film. Compared with the endings of the above three films: "Marriage Story" not only ended the incident, but also settled the movie's emotions with the audience's emotions; "Terrorist" has ushered in the end of the incident, but created emotional suspension. (see Figure 2); "A Parting" not only continues the event unfinished, but also allows the emotion to be suspended along with the scene (see Figure 3). Comparing the three endings in this way, the latter two have stronger, more lasting and deeper thematic lives.
On the whole, the superb performance of the actors, the skillful directing skills and the realistic elements all make "Marriage Story" have the conditions and level to become a quality masterpiece of the year. In fact, it has indeed brought us a lot of meaningful moving, discussion and thinking. Only in the presentation of the theme as one of the symbols of "greatness", this film always restricts marriage to the category of metaphysical event causality, lacking a more aggressive metaphysical setting, thinking and analysis. The design of the film's ending also stays in the "fantasy frame", giving things new symbols and values under the reconciliation of a certain emotion, but it has never been separated from this eventual internal relationship. The events in "Marriage Story" aren't what Žižek calls "results beyond causes," and we certainly can't ask every film to step into the realm of metaphysical themes, but there's still good reason to be The expectation in this regard is the expectation of a great masterpiece.
View more about Marriage Story reviews
