Scarlett Johansson has not been seen in more depth for a long time: in Noah Baumbach's divorce drama "Marriage Story", a Netflix production that competes at the Venice Festival, Hollywood's currently best-earning actress presents herself unvarnished, haunted, fragile and with a boyish short haircut.
Johansson plays an actress who once left her early career in LA to follow a man to the Off-Theater in New York. She becomes the star of his productions, gets a son - and eventually realizes that she herself has completely disappeared behind the claims, desires and lifestyles of her partner. She separates, goes back to her family on the West Coast - and submits the divorce.
"Marriage Story" has a lot to endure here at the Lido: The Venice Festival has been considered a ramp for the Oscar contenders for the upcoming awards season in the United States for some years, and almost all recent winners have premiered here, including "Gravity "," Birdman "," The Shape Of Water "and most recently" Roma ", also from Netflix.
This year, the program seemed a bit less shining in advance, so the New Yorker comedy comedy specialist Noah Baumbach's "The Squid And The Whale" (New York), "The Squid And The Whale", is considered one of the few competitive films that awaited them everywhere Oscar magic can unfold.
Does the film withstand this pressure? On the one hand yes, because as I said: Scarlett Johansson is stunning in her ability to spill up from the miserable pile of misery to the injured "Fuck" cursing fury. It makes even more curious about their upcoming solo effort as "Black Widow" in Marvel's "Avengers" universe. But "Marriage Story" is not really her movie. He belongs to her male counterpart, the director's alter ego, portrayed by Adam Driver ("Star Wars", "Paterson").
Tiring two hours
Baumbach, who once filmed his childhood in Brooklyn, is obviously processing his divorce from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, who split from him in 2010. Already clear that the sympathy of the filmmaker is there in the end but rather in the male part of the divorce war, as much as the film endeavors to parity.
In fact, Driver, anyway one of the best actors of his generation, is brilliant as a genius theater egoist. He breaks his heart when he cries, and seems lost when he has to travel from his New York habitat to hateful, far too sunny and sprawling LA to see his son and expensive lawyers (including Laura Dern, Ray Liotta) to seek out the little sad separation make a dirty, blatant divorce show.
In truth, this is also the problem of this film charged with so much pressure on the event: in the end, despite all its personal drama, it tells a fairly everyday story, which looks bigger than it is with actor parades and star power. Again and again you have to think, also because of Drivers "shaggy" Dustin Hoffman hairstyle, to the best and most touching divorce war in the cinema today: Robert Benton's "Kramer vs. Kramer" from 1979.
But he played in front of a completely different social background and thus unfolded a relevance beyond private life. At that time, the public discourse about equality, emancipation, and individualism in marriage had just begun, making the story so urgent. Thus, from "Marriage Story" to ultimately tiring two hours, especially the aftertaste that the hierarchy and communication problems between spouses in 40 years apparently have not improved a bit.
Oscar nominations for Johansson (hopefully) and Driver (pretty sure) should be there anyway. And of course Noah Baumbach cleverly negotiates in his film his own, deeply masculine sheephead, which lets men fall from the clouds again and again, when things explode around them whose boiling they have not noticed.
This motif is also modified in the competition entry "Ad Astra": Brad Pitt literally crashes out of these clouds in James Gray's film. He plays an astronaut who trundles and falls to the bottomless with a detonation on a transmission tower reaching into the stratosphere.
Film Festival Venice
Brad Pitt in "Ad Astra": apparently a hero
But Pitts Major McBride is - apparently - a hero of the old Hollywood School, he has his abilities and his job under control. From the off, he explains how he can subordinate everything - love, feelings, family - to his mission and does not come with the rest pulse above 80. Not in the fall into the bottomless, and later in the movie not when he masters probably the first car chase on the moon, including shootings.
But "Ad Astra" is not an action film and thriller, but a highly atmospheric and meta-texted therapy session in front of a spectacular space backdrop that confronts the supermajor with suppressed fears and complexes that triggered his father's early disappearance (Tommy Lee Jones). a no less capable astronaut who has lost orbit in orbit. McBride begins a space odyssey in the most toxic zone of the male psyche: the solipsism.
And Brad Pitt, who already starred in Tarantino's "Once upon a Time ... in Hollywood" this year, plays this gradually crumbling Buzz Lightyear with new nuance and depth that could set him on Oscar course.
One always likes to watch these men circling around in the cinema. But it's getting cold out there too.
