re: Marriage Story (Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson) premiered on Netflix today

I thought it was a really good movie about two self-absorbed people who probably should have gone to marriage counseling rather than get divorced. We do get caught up in who is at fault in their marriage, but it's important that we never see them as a married couple, just them getting divorced, where they shape their memories to fit their narratives.

In that context, the person most responsible for the divorce becoming as contentious as it did was Scarlett. She extracts compromises out of Adam in good faith, and then exploits that good faith at every turn. She hires the expensive shark attorney, turning it into a war, but more importantly, sees a dozen other attorneys to deny him the chance to obtain counsel. His only options are an attorney who is too nice (Alan Alda) or too mean (Ray Liotta).

Now, they should have listened to Alan Alda. He was right: everything they would eventually agree on was in that settlement conference in the first place. If Adam wanted to see his kid, he was always going to have to move to LA, and frankly, that was the only issue they were fighting. At the end of the day, they agreed financially where they were originally. All of the excess money went to the lawyers. She turned it into a war, and wars about winning. ell, she walked out of the mediation in the opening scene.

But, maybe they needed that war. Because their screaming match, as awful as it was on a human level, was the moment things started to get better. They remembered who it was they were hurting, and stopped trying to be the person that hurts the other. Which is evidenced by the end when they swap days because its better for the kid, not because of who would win, or whose day it was supposed to be. They became better parents, which you wish they could have while still being married.