Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson 

Marriage Story review – everything you always wanted to know about divorce

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are terrific as a couple facing the awful aftermath of their relationship in Noah Baumbach’s heartfelt drama

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ll marriages are a mystery to outsiders, they say, and even more so to the married people themselves. In 2013, writer-director Noah Baumbach got divorced from screen star Jennifer Jason Leigh, and, until Leigh presents us with her own fictionalised movie version of their breakup (and who knows if she hasn’t considered it, or is considering it), we won’t have anything approaching the complete creative picture. Until then, here is Baumbach’s superb Marriage Story, a glorious laugh-out-loud, cry-out-loud portrait of a relationship in its death throes.

This wonderfully sweet, sad and funny film simply delivers more moment-by-moment pleasure than anything else around. It would be reductive to call it autobiographical, but it is notable how scrupulously generous his movie is to the soon-to-be-ex-wife figure, played impeccably by Scarlett Johansson. It is adroitly balanced and emotionally calibrated, although there are incidental details about who is the first to lawyer up, and a 55/45% split in the child custody arrangement. I wonder what Leigh makes of these points.