Thoughts on Breakup Movies

In one class we talked about the movies Her and Lost in Translation*, how they are sort of letters from ex lovers to each other. I was reminded of those movies again while watching the movie Marriage Story on Netflix. I feel like every time I google Scarlett Johansson's age she's younger than before, and I joked to my boyfriend that by her next movie I'll be older than her. She's 35 now and in 2003 when Lost In Translation came out she was 17 years old. I saw the movie in theaters and as a teenager assumed she was an adult. After all, her character was married!

Like those aforementioned Scarlett Johansson movies, Marriage Story seems like it was probably largely inspired by a personal experience of the person who wrote and directed the movie. I mean, the divorcing couple are an actress and a director - how could it not be? If you manage to write something that rings this true, maybe you have to mix in a lot of truth about how you yourself are in the world.

In Marriage Story the best thing, I think, is how both of these characters seem like whole people, and they do decisions that make sense for themselves. Neither is the bad guy. They're both extremely frustrating but understandable and lovable, and their relationship makes sense as much as their break up does.

There's a TVTropes page called "Most Writers Are Writers", because... yeah. Basically if everyone wrote about what they know, all stories would have writers in them. (Out of Stephen King's 300 stories maybe a fifth have author characters, and a fifth of those authors have substance abuse problems.) There's also a truth about writers and directors in Hollywood, that Sofia Coppola is an exception - most writers and directors are men, so usually it's just one side of the story we get to hear and it's his.

La La Land, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Her, 500 Days of Summer, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Before Midnight come to mind when thinking about movies about break ups. Incidentally all of them feature an artistic man (often even a writer), in a relationship with some extraordinary woman who dumps them to pursue her own goals. (In Before Midnight they don't actually break up, although they discuss it extensively and it's Celine's dissatisfaction with the current state of their relationship that is causing all the drama.)

Marriage Story is the one that states it plainly in the dialogue in the scene where the main characters try to one last time settle their separation between themselves. 

Charlie: We had a great theater company, and a great life where we were.
Nicole: You call that a great life?
Charlie: You know what I mean. I don’t mean we had a great marriage. I mean, life in Brooklyn. Professionally. I don’t know. Honestly, I never considered anything different.
Nicole: Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I mean, I was your wife. You should’ve considered my happiness too.
Charlie: Come on, you were happy. You’ve just decided you weren’t now.
Nicole: The only reason we didn’t live here is because you can’t imagine desires other than your own, unless they’re forced on you.

In real life it's also women who usually instigate break ups. Always after these movies, you could ask "why didn't she stay" - and I'm over here screaming with frustration - "why didn't he just change for her?" He always ends up changing after she dumps him, anyway. She tried! She waited! And still she should've waited and tried some more.

*
I re-watched Lost In Translation some time ago and it hit me just how stupid it is. "Oh when I was in my twenties I was sort of lost, you know. I was absurdly famous and rich and didn't really know what to do with all of this massive amount of resources and talent and connections that I had." We're supposed to feel for Sofia Scarlett Johansson's character, who has everything anyone who could ever dream of and her whole life ahead of her. We're supposed to feel for Bill Murray's character and his middle age crisis while he hits on a teenager and cheats on his wife, as if he didn't have all the choice in the world about how his life has gone and what to do with it from now on. I used to think these characters were so cool.