Marriage Story
I finished watching Marriage Story a few days ago, and today I feel ready to talk about it.
The title is “Marriage Story,” yet it tells the story of a divorce. I find this angle very clever. There are perhaps a thousand ways to talk about love, but what about marriage? What is there to say about marriage?
For now, setting aside the more weighty forms of marriage tied to family or national destiny, this story and I only want to explore what marriage means to the two people who comprise it. I think there are at least four elements involved: romantic love, familial affection, friendship, and marriage itself as a kind of space.
Marriage might be something trivial and boring. Humans only celebrate romantic love, not its legal container; they celebrate familial affection, not one of its methods of production; they celebrate friendship—a special kind of space that holds a unique bond. It’s like the relationship between “home” and “house”: closely connected but fundamentally different.
What this film discusses is what happens when love fades, when a once harmonious world becomes disharmonious. It uses that response as a mirror to reflect some outline of marriage itself.
At the beginning of the film, Charlie and Nicole write down their impressions and feelings about each other in front of their divorce counselor, preparing to end their ten-year marriage. You can clearly sense that even after deciding to divorce, they both still feel so clear and tender toward each other.
So why divorce?
Humans are bundles of contradictions. Many discordant spaces surround us, giving birth to different identities, constructing different symbolic systems, generating perhaps conflicting perceptions, and thus fostering different aspirations. The choices we make based on certain of these aspirations inevitably block the expression of others. When blocked long enough, emotions accumulate and eventually erupt.
For Nicole and Charlie, such compromises and the resulting dissatisfaction accumulated slowly over the long years, finally erupting one day before the film’s story begins, leading them to choose divorce.
But the entire film is very gentle. Even the intense quarrel later feels deeply rooted in everyday life—something you or I could easily do in our daily routines.
This is what I love most about the film. Because in ordinary people’s lives, there isn’t that much drama, no wonderfully tense stroke of luck or misfortune packed tightly together—at least not very densely. Yet we still live, or life still flows through us, and many things happen quietly, some so uneventful that only years later, recalling them, can we piece together their full picture. The film presents two people we can understand (at least I can; at least I can identify with Nicole and Charlie) jointly completing such an unexciting project as divorce.
What impressed me most, apart from Charlie and Nicole’s quarrel at the film’s climax, is the scene where Nicole gives Charlie a haircut.
This scene fully reveals what I call the sense of everyday life. They are fighting for custody of their child, yet in this situation, they can still, like countless times before, accomplish an intimate and ordinary task. The intense struggle for rights and this act do not conflict—their coexistence itself embodies a huge clash of completely different spaces, a profound sense of disharmony. This disharmony creates an immense tension that almost bursts your head, revealing the essence of marriage.
Though I have never truly experienced marriage, I can still understand this film and see some reflections of myself in both Charlie and Nicole. So much so that this film, like the lingering, intoxicating electric guitar in Don’t Cry, pulls me in, letting me feel that warm yet slightly melancholic sense of being enveloped.
After that not-so-violent quarrel, the film reaches its peaceful conclusion.
