#Greenberg kicking and screaming 1995

[wallflowerglitter]

Trying to cram some movies before I fall back into the kdrama black hole.

[thefilmstage]

Tastefully adorned Brooklyn apartments. Self-effacing dialogue. Lingering melancholy. A-list stars, including Adam Driver, comfily dressed-down, as if they’d skipped tinsel town to open a corner bookshop. And so forth and so on. You would hardly need a BA in Contemporary American Cinema to equate the opening moments of Marriage Story to the work of Noah Baumbach.

The New York director’s films have always seemed to flitter somewhere between the bittersweet and the lowdown–first coming to us with Kicking and Screaming in 1995 but only establishing a brand with The Squid and the Whale a whole decade after–a film that remains his most caustic and personal, and perhaps still his best–at least until now. His more recent work (self-deprecating comedies about the anxieties of impending middle age (Greenberg, While We’re Young, The Meyerowitz Stories) have suggested a move towards the genial but Marriage Story sees the director tie those two threads together in a way, and one wonders what has taken so long.

Continue reading our Venice review of Marriage Story.