Short review of "Marriage Story", 2019, Noah Baumbach

Baumbach's "Annie Hall" is a mix between a Woody Allen 1980s film and a Pixar tearjerker mixed with sprinkles of Spielberg's suburbia.  He is being pulled apart between his wokeness, arguably a West Coast sentiment, and his position as a leading voice of New York's moneyed hipsters, or as we used to call it, "the intelligentsia".  It is fairly difficult to make a Hollywood robotic star like Johansson likable at all, and he tries, but the movie sits firmly with his alter ego, Adam Driver, both of which play characters whose names is not worth remembering. It is well filmed, and contains a fair share of sardonic humor, but it is not a masterpiece. Whatever internal war between elites Baumbach is fighting in his head, we the people are left outside of it.  Woody's hypochondriacs often were natural working or middle class New Yorkers.  Driver's character, instead, is supposed to be a transplant that made it but just feels like another bourgeois that got lucky and landed a young starlet in disarray.  I guess that being born into cultured royalty makes difficult to connect with normal folk.  Whatever grievances exists between these people, they're far from the zeitgeist that both "Parasite" or "Joker", to give recent examples, are tapping.  Baumbach is still living in a privileged bubble on which his characters can live anachronic phenomena like the process of real romance, professional growth and success and hurtful divorce. The eighties and nineties are long gone by now. We are just trying to survive.