I don't have a kid. I've never been divorced. Or even married. Though I guess I was once a kid myself, I'm not the product of a divorced couple. I'm not even the product of a married one. Everyone I know who has gotten married or had kids did it before I met them, or stopped hanging out with me almost immediately afterward. Everyone I've ever met who got divorced either did it before I met them, or is someone I stopped hanging out with beforehand. So I don't come to the subject of Marriage Story with a wealth of experience, which means it doesn't exactly scream "relatable content" to me.
Let me start where it's easiest and everyone seems to agree: The performances. Everyone in Marriage Story is pretty great, none of the characterisations changed my life, but I get it. As a chance to display what these actors are capable of in a mundane setting where all that matters is their performance, yes, absolutely, Marriage Story has buckets of success.
Outside of this though... I'm not even going to say that it "fails" elsewhere, just that it didn't win me. I like bleak movies, I like movies that make me feel something, even if it's sad. But Marriage Story isn't really that. It poses you the question of whether both Charlie and Nicole are good or bad people, and shows you each from their own and other's perspective. The ending seems to imply that they're good, or at the very least both good and bad (and aren't we all?) but that really doesn't matter very much when we just spent all this time watching both of them be horrible. I know that's life, that's real, that's people, and blah bl-blah bl-blah, but that's little consolation when I've just spent two-plus hours of my life being not at all compelled by a bunch of people being awful. Being awful convincingly, to the actors' respective credits, but in this setting that is not my idea of a good time at the movies.
46%
-Gimly