For some people I know this was easy to gloss over, but if somebody told me the movie's emotional stakes were COMPLETELY ruined for them when it turns out that the husband DID DO what for most of the movie he's only suspected of doing on the part of the audience, I'd let them hold that. Again, I really, really hold Marriage Story in high regard, but that was hard to reconcile with this one thing that honestly still nags at me about it.

I get why you want to pull what Adam Driver's character did out of the realm of speculation into fact for the benefit of ScarJo's character, but to that point a lot of the movie's tension rests on who you believe in a given scene or who's being the / a bigger asshole, but once you know what he did it's kind of like...she's right, y'know? At the end of the day she's right, and as a child of divorce whose parents separated because they just plain aged apart from each other in every way from hobbies to politics, I kind of wanted to see a movie that accepted sometimes that's all a divorce is about, not some big betrayal but a series of small, unintentional ones.

It also retroactively raises questions about Adam's behavior in scenes prior to that reveal and whether he's truly emotionally abusive while ScarJo is just kind of going through it, and you can tell those aren't things Baumbach intended for Marriage Story to be about.


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