I have been consistent in my insistence that Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” will be the movie everybody raves about this fall festival season. I had already heard two accounts that used the word “masterpiece” in their admiration for the film; Not to mention the fact that it has now, as predicted, been chosen for all four major fall festivals (Toronto, Telluride, Venice and New York). That’s right, the New York Film Festival has just announced today that Baumbach’s latest will be the centerpiece selection of the festival, which is usually a slot reserved for the film the NYFF have the highest aspirations for, the centerpiece of the whole event.
The Netflix drama will be celebrated in New York at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on Friday, October 4. “Marriage Story” will be released in select theaters and on Netflix later this year.
In a statement, the festival said Baumbach’s new film “is about the rapid tangling and gradual untangling of impetuosity, resentment, and abiding love between a married couple negotiating their divorce and the custody of their son. Adam Driver is Charlie, a 100-percent New York experimental theater director; Scarlett Johansson is Nicole, his principal actress and soon-to-be L.A.-based ex-wife. Their ‘amicable’ breakup devolves, one painful rash response and hostile counter-response at a time, into a legal battlefield, led on Nicole’s side by Laura Dern and on Charlie’s side by ‘nice’ Alan Alda and ‘not-so-nice’ Ray Liotta.”
It is a film that hinges on “its frank understanding of the emotional fluctuations between Charlie and Nicole: they are both short-sighted, both occasionally petty, both vindictive, and both loving. The film is as harrowing as it is hilarious as it is deeply moving. With Merritt Wever and Julie Hagerty as Nicole’s sister and mom, and Azhy Robertson as their beloved son, Henry.”
NYFF festival director Kent Jones added of the film, “What amazed me about ‘Marriage Story’ is the way that Noah keeps the many conflicting emotions between his characters flowing into and around and under and over each other, so beautifully that the film achieves the condition of music. In fact, it actually flowers into song in two of the film’s loveliest and most surprising moments. ‘Marriage Story’ is a heartbreaker, it’s very funny, and it has an emotional complexity that’s worthy of Bergman.”
Baumbach added in his own statement, “I grew up coming to the New York Film Festival with my parents. And it’s where my first film ‘Kicking and Screaming’ premiered 24 years ago. I couldn’t be more thrilled and proud that ‘Marriage Story’ has been selected as Centerpiece of the NYFF. The 14-year-old me’s mind is blown; the 49-year-old me’s mind is also blown.”
It’s the real deal, folks. Bank on it.