Marriage Story opens with a montage narrating the things Nicole and Charlie love about each other. These look like ordinary, everyday moments that only someone who loves you would notice. Bumping your head on the kitchen cabinet your partner left open. Cups of tea left around the house. The way you talk to strangers on the street. Taking care of your kid at night. It’s these little moments that really make up a life, a marriage and a love story. This love story takes place within a divorce.
Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) live in New York. Charlie directs a theater company and Nicloe is his lead actress. She used to live in Los Angeles and even had a memorable part in a movie. Now after years of life, marriage and a kid, Henry (Azhy Robertson), of about seven years old, Nicole wants to divorce. She moves out to live in LA with their son to shoot a TV pilot, but she doesn’t tell Charlie that she intends to stay.
This lack of communication is bewildering to Charlie, who assumes they are and always will be a New York based family. Soon, Nicole is doing more things her own way, getting a divorce lawyer (Laura Dern) when they agreed before to not use lawyers. While Nicole is busy being the primary parent for their son and expanding her career, Charlie is stretched thin trying to keep his play and theater company going in New York while also frequenting to LA to deal with this divorce and try to be present for his son.
One of my favorite scenes in the film is when the power goes out at Nicole’s place. Henry is with his father for the night and video chatting with his mom when she can’t open her gate. Without hesitation Charlie and Henry go to help her. Charlie gets things working again and while he’s there Nicole gives him a quick haircut. Henry falls asleep and Nicole wants to just bring him inside, but Charlie reminds her it’s his night. The whole scene is peaceful and sweet in a dutiful way. When the gate closes between them we see a look of sadness and longing. We get a sense that this is how they’re lives together will be now, civil and helping each other but no longer lovers.
There is so, so much to unpack in this movie, but one of the themes that hit me hardest is how parents are perceived and judged, especially under the microscope of divorce. The lawyers bring everything out and turn normal little moments into weapons of shame. We see Charlie nervously stage his new apartment before a social worker visits to observe him and Henry together. It’s probably the most pressure he’s ever been under to be a good father. Meanwhile, Nora preps Nicole for questioning about her personal life and drinking habits, warning her that her honest answers won’t be good enough. I love how she bluntly points out the double standard against all women, “People don’t accept mothers who drink too much wine and yell at their child and call him an asshole. I get it. I do it too. We can accept an imperfect dad. Let’s face it, the idea of a good father was only invented like 30 years ago. … We love them for their fallibilities, but people absolutely don’t accept those same failings in mothers.”
Marriage Story is nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, original screenplay and original score. Laura Dern is nominated for supporting actress. Adam Driver is nominated for lead actor. And Scarlett Johansson is nominated for best actress. She’s also nominated for her supporting role in Jojo Rabbit. She’s one of the few actors to earn to acting nominations in one year.
What Marriage Story does best is show a realistic couple trying to separate their lives the best they can. For Nicole, every step is both brave and scary, though she tries not to show it. Thankfully she has family to support her, though her mother is not exactly great at it, but she does add a lot of laughs to the film. Nicole’s lawyer, Nora is the first person (maybe in her whole life) to really ask Nicole what she wants and validates that what she wants is important. In a wonderful monologue, Nicole describes how she and Charlie came together and how she just fell into his life and she never really made her own. It’s sad and probably rings very true to other people’s love stories. For Nicole to pursue her own “aliveness” is an act of hope.
“Getting divorced with a kid is one of the hardest things to do. It’s like a death without a body.”
The first image in BlacKkKlansman is a familiar one for most film fans. It’s that iconic longshot in Gone with the Wind where Scarlett looks for a doctor among a sprawling rusty red-dirt field of wounded Confederate soldiers that pans out to show a tattered Confederate flag waving above them. It reminds us that many men fought and died to keep black men in bondage. As slaves. And to this day some try to keep it that way. 
The film’s story, crazy enough, is based on a fact. It centers on Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), the Colorado Springs first black police officer. He and a small team work together to infiltrate a local KKK chapter. When initially making contact through an ad in the newspaper, Ron calls them up and uses his real name. A hilarious mistake in the moment. Obviously Ron cannot meet the members face to face, to he has fellow officer, Flip (Adam Driver) do that for him. Ron keeps making plans over the phone and Flip becomes Ron face-to-face. But the deeper they go the more dangerous it gets. When Ron and Flip learn of a possible threat to a local college’s black student union, shit gets personal and really real. 
Adam Driver delivers a thoughtful and spectacular performance in this film, the best in his career so far, in my opinion. He’s a young Jewish police officer going undercover inside the KKK posing as Ron. It’s a lot of pressure, but he must remain cool. When he dismisses his Jewish heritage at first with Ron, it feels like self defense. But as he spends more and more time with Walter and the other KKK members, we can feel their constant hate rhetoric getting to him, especially when one accuses him of being Jewish. Driver performs this double life well and so convincingly, driving this film forward, even while Ron is running things in the background. 
A scene that I cannot get out of my head is when Flip/Ron is being initiated into the KKK, while down the street the black student union is listening to an elder’s story about a young man on trial. David Duke and the other white men perform their ceremony with reverence for what their doing and then celebrate by watching Birth of a Nation, a silent film often used and referenced by white supremacists. While we watch this, we hear the old black man’s story about how his friend was found guilty for a crime he didn’t commit, then dragged into the street, tortured, mutilated and burned. And everyone came to watch “like it was the fourth of July.” The juxtaposition between these two things happening at the same time is astounding and speaks volumes about the opposing experiences of African Americans vs white men. 
I would warn people seeking this film out because of it’s Oscar nominated status to use discretion. This film is packed full of the most vile hate speech I’ve ever heard and it can get to you, or worse, you can become numb to it after a while. The hateful, ignorant, bigoted, asinine things Walter (Ryan Eggold) and his KKK buddies say are absolutely awful, to think that there are people who actually think and talk that way is sickening. But Lee reminds us at the end that those people are still around in a graphic and gripping way using footage from the events in Charlottesville from 2017. It’s not for the faint of heart.
I don’t remember exactly when I saw my first Star Wars movie. It was early enough in childhood that the story and characters became a constant background in my young mind. I’ve known Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie longer than any friends I can call up. To bring them back and extend their stories is a treasure, not just for me, I’m sure, but for every other life long fan. And The Force Awakens does not disappoint.
In The Force Awakens, Luke Skywalker is missing. Both the Resistance and the First Order (the leftovers of the Empire that just won’t die) are looking for him. A map to Luke ends up with a droid, BB-8, stranded on the desert planet of Jakku. Rey (Daisy Ridley), a scavenger girl, happens upon BB-8. When a runaway Stormtrooper, Fin (John Boyega), finds them, he, Rey and BB-8 have to outrun the First Order and get the map to the Resistance. There’s a lot of great action and old friends to help along the way.
While the Empire is dead, The First Order are just as threatening, if not more. They have created another planet destroying machine, even more powerful than the Death Star. While at first glance Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is a Darth Vader wannabe, and General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) seems like a Weasley brother gone bad, they are both prove to be characters we can love hating to add to the Star Wars saga. And while we only see Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) as a giant hologram, he is a powerful and menacing presence. 
While the film is full of action, fun references for fans and intense Dark Side moments with our new villains. there is a perfect amount of heart for old fans. The love story that was budding between Han and Leia in the previous episode now walks a delicate line between sweet and sad. I don’t want to spoil anything, but Han and Leia have gone from star-crossed lovers to an old estranged couple whose family was torn apart from the inside. I’ll keep my theories quiet here, but I believe we will find out more in episode VIII. Just seeing Han and Leia again for the first time in over 30 years itself is a love story for the ages.
The Best Picture Project 