Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) are married with a young son. They're working on their divorce. She's an L.A. girl with a popular teen movie when she followed him to NYC. He becomes a well regarded theater director and she's his leading lady. She wants to return to L.A. to start a new TV show while he's bringing his show to Broadway. She hires divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern).

There have been many divorce movies over the years. This is one of the better ones. It has a great opening which probably gaslighted me to this marriage. I kept hoping for reconciliation or at least, an easy peace. This gets to some dark places and it climaxes to a powerful scene in the motel room. The movie needs to wrap up a little quicker after that climatic fight. I would like some parts to go a different way but at the end of the day, this is Noah Baumbach's story. He probably drew some inspiration from his real life and who am I to judge. There are good laughs and there are devastating moments. It is a highlight of an interesting career.

Adam Driver is an off-Broadway director who has just won a MacArthur Grant. Scarlett Johansson is the leading player of his company. Their marriage is falling to pieces. She has just gotten a TV pilot, so she's off to California with their son. They've agreed to an amicable divorce, but she gets a lawyer in California, so he gets a lawyer in California, and things go straight to heck.

Hitchcock said "The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." Netflix has set that at naught. Once upon a time, you saw a movie in a theater, and you didn't want to duck out on a feature, so you headed for the facilities while the James Fitzpatrick Traveltalk was on. Later, you might see it on television, where the presence of "station identifications" served as features rather than bugs. Now we have the ability to not only watch from the comfort of our homes, but to stop and start the movie at our pleasure. You can watch this movie's 136 minutes -- that's the length of a season of a British series -- in little more than two hours, or stretch it to over whatever time you wish. Go, take a bath, read WAR AND PEACE, take a trip around the world, these poor characters will be waiting to suffer for your pleasure whenever you like.

Is that even a movie as we understand the word? With the constraint of time removed, there's no need to limit the length of the...show. Nor was there much evidence that the film makers had. The leads are brilliant performers; they indulge in long, one-shot monologues, they inhabit their characters, it's a brilliant supporting cast, the leads each sing a song from Sondheim's COMPANY, and by the end of it, it seemed to have gone on as long as my 18-month divorce had. As soon as I left the theater, I began to trim the movie in my own mind, and soon had taken half an hour from it without losing anything from the story. True, you wouldn't hear Miss Johanssen, Julie Hagerty and Merritt Wever sing "You Could Drive A Person Crazy" in my version, showing the enormous range and ability necessary to winning awards. But you could go on a date, eat a meal, see the movie, and get home in time to get to work the next morning.

Oh, concessions could have been made. An intermission could have been put in. It wasn't, because it was never made with that in mind. So, no, I don't think it's a movie, even if I did see it in a movie theater.

Was it good? As someone who went through a bad divorce, it was too raw for me.

"Marriage Story" is a film about a couple which is going trough the phases of a divorce. The best thing about this movie is that the characters, the two protagonists in particular, have a very human taste and they seem like real people feeling real emotions. And thanks to the excellent performances by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson these emotions are able to touch the heart of the viewer with all their power and at the same time with a delicate taste. As far as the theme of the divorce the movie is a critic about the process of it, on how it makes the couple waste a lot of money but most importantly on the hate it creates. Indeed the protagonists starts the process with all the good intentions to split up peacefully but when the lawyers kicks in they found themselves in a fight they don't even want. And another aspect "Marriage Story" manages to get right is that both Charlie and Nicole had their faults and they also had been disrespected in different ways and so the movie conveys the idea that in these situations usually (not everytime) the blame is on both, maybe not equally but everyone had his faults. "Marriage Story" is a great movie, with excellent acting, a touching screenplay, an immersive direction and a delicate score: check this one out!