Two Netflix films document the fragility of marriage over time. Each does so in a compassionate and thorough manner. One takes place in 1960, the other in present day. Intimate as they are, the stories reflect the historical tensions of the periods in which they are situated.
Wildlife is a very spare and visually evocative film based on a Richard Ford novel, written and directed by two actors, Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan. Marriage Story is the latest from Noah Baumbach. In both cases, the subject is marriage disintegration, and both provide insight into how we have come to live the way we do.
We are at an apex moment in our self-conscious examination of our circumstances. There has been a slowly maturing common understanding of modern nature that holds that we do not inhabit any particular role or essence. On the road to this understanding, we have been forced to attend to the various collateral effects.
Marriage pairing has been taken by both sexes to be a settled domain, and has been experienced as such. What is less expected is that it can also put into clear relief what has yet to be settled for the individuals involved. This has been most poignant for women and baffling for men. Many women have yet to be “made”, and over the last century and half, they have seen and taken more opportunities to become so, but they do it within their particular trying historical circumstances.
Wildlife clearly depicts the late fifties, early sixties as not providing any roadmap for the lower middle class female protagonist. She must awkwardly muddle through to find herself, risking to be seen as deranged and desperate. Along with this, her inarticulate husband has no vocabulary for understanding what she sets in motion. It would take another fifty years before the sense of these necessary actions towards autonomy become part of the everyday landscape, and even here the precise unfolding of events and attitudes are difficult to trace for those in the midst of a crisis. It continues to take longer for a usable lexicon for these matters to become familiar.
Baumbach does a great job tracing out the reasons for and the dynamics of conjugal breakdown for people who married young and are approaching middle-age. It is a realm full of paradox. How could people who loved each other become distant, even oppressive? Was the love ever real? In his exposition, Baumbach makes clear that both sides of the paradox are indeed genuine. The original settling was what each person desired. The needs fulfilled had a timeline. A chance to learn, enter adulthood and engage in intimate mutuality. Another timeline is set in motion at this point, that of parents and child. Regardless of any change in the conjugal arrangement, this separate timeline endures.
With the fulfillment of the original needs, others less well attended to, back-burnered, or whose nature was merely assumed, emerge and reveal themselves to be outside the settled formula. Reconfiguring the latter is difficult as the re-pursued needs open up many possibilities. If one side is anxious to turn things over, and the other slower to the task, it is a recipe for cleavage. With the offspring timeline thrown in, it is time for the lawyers who make everything sad.
In Marriage Story Baumbach portrays the lawyers to be the ones able to wield the power of explanatory vocabulary for what the protagonists are experiencing. The latter intuit the ways to apply the language to their lives in order to preserve the civility their original romance celebrated. The pathway, though, is arduous.
The actors in both films are up to the task of nuancing these difficult circumstances and feelings. The directors very ably setting a frame for their performances. Dano’s framing is austere, but very clear and unencumbered. Baumbach has left the strictly classic narrative approach in which he wrapped the sentiments of his previous family tales, and uses techniques familiar to other contemporary filmmakers that force a distance on emotion and an embrace of deliberation. In some brilliantly performed scenes the audience is required to withhold judgment and follow the thought trajectories of the protagonists and the advice of their advocates as former struggle to find the sense of situation and their lives. In this way, the film allows us to trace how the the self-conscious use of vocabulary for the pragmatic resolution of marital crisis has evolved from the time of Wildlife to the present where it is wielded by lawyers and therapists, to the promise that it can be part of common knowledge soon enough.