Well, I’m moving this up to a five. Baumbach lives in my brain. It’s encouraging that he’s made a career out of his bad dad.
Interesting to watch now from a couple new personal angles: I’ve lived in New York, I’ve seen Marriage Story, and I’ve got a better understanding of modern 16/35mm filmmaking.
Much of his new film echoes Meyerowitz, and it’s a beautiful evolution between those two films but also from his earlier work (especially when they concerned similar topics like father-son relationships in Squid and the Whale and estranged sibling relationships in Margot at the Wedding). Squid is firmly within the children’s perspective—the parents are the outsiders. And Margot seems to be from a nihilistic omniscient perspective—everybody is an outsider. What Baumbach began with Meyerowitz is this unbiased narrative structure that makes it feel like we’re close with the whole cast of characters. It’s highly fragmented, but it covers all directions. Then that Marriage Story is even a development upon that—he’s dropped the fragmentation. It’s this type of filmmaking I’ve really started to love over the last couple years. It’s something I associate with Mike Leigh, John Cassavetes, and Spike Lee* (when he’s at his best). I know I mention them a lot, but I can’t help myself. I’ve got three directions I really love in cinema, and they perfectly encapsulate one of them (the other two are surrealism via Lynch/Fellini and slow transcendental and/or nihilistic via Tarr/Kieslowski). Baumbach is almost there; he’s just got one more step to go (but he’s still making masterpieces in the process, plus it’s not only him making these movies, I ain’t no auteur-theory proponent): he needs to let his characters speak for themselves rather than for him. It’ll be a subtle change, and he’s almost there, but I still get the feeling it’s all still fabricated solely from his experiences. And that isn’t ideal for the style of filmmaking he’s going for. Consult with your actors more during writing (like Leigh), and he’ll be there in a jiffy. That might sound like a big criticism, but I don’t really see it as a negative for any of the films he’s made, just a direction I’d like to see his career progress. Of course, I know he’s reading this right now, so please Noah make those changes.
I’ll be rooting for Sandler this year for his performance in Uncut Gems, but secretly it’ll be partially for this.
*I’ll add to that list of three directors if I come up with any more.