Marriage Story: A Star Is Born, Almost Again

Marriage Story on Netflix, as you likely already know, is a divorce story, more specifically, a story of a couple who pretty much love each other, and have a son, splitting up.  In that sense, it's pretty much an old story, one we've seen on the screen many times, but it's lifted by strong acting from Adam Driver (just seen in Star Wars) as Charlie and Scarlett Johansson as Nicole, witty dialogue, and some primo scenes.

My favorite was Charlie and Nicole screaming at each other about why they split up, both brought to tears by the knowledge they already knew that they still loved each, and frustrated beyond belief that this had happened to them.  So, why did it happen?  That's the story of this Marriage Story.

It's actually a little more Nicole's than Charlie's story, since she initiated the break-up.  She couldn't abide her creative life being subsumed by Charlie's, something he was for the most part blissfully unaware of.  I guess to make her leaving more believable and better motivated, he does sleep with another woman - though only "once," as he would and does tell us, and Nicole as well.

But the deeper story is how can two creative people have a life together?  This was explored beautifully in A Star Is Born, more than once, four times, to be exact, but that was a special case of marriage of an aging star and a rising starlet (or singer), which story very different than Marriage Story, where Charlie is only a bit ahead of Nicole in his success.  So maybe Marriage Story can be best understood as a compressed Star Is Born, though likely not.

Driver also does some impressive singing in the movie, of a Stephen Sondheim song no less.  Which raises another point.  There's a studied hipness in this movie.  But it's done so well that it doesn't seem studied.

Anyway, romantic that I am, I would've liked to have seen the two together at end, and who knows, since this isn't A Star Is Born, that could actually happen, notwithstanding Nicole's boring boyfriend.

Lucy: Calling Keyes and Asimov

I finally got around to seeing Luc Besson's Lucy last night, starring Scarlet Johansson in the title role.   Parts of it were just high-tech, drug-dealing shoot 'em up, on a par with John Wick, which is to say, nothing really special in retrospect.  But parts of it were pretty good high-concept science fiction, in the tradition of Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon" and  Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question".

In both cases, I'm talking about the short written fiction versions first published in the 1950s.  In "Flowers," a contender for the best science fiction story ever written, in my opinion, we're told the heartbreaking tale of a man with below-average intelligence who receives a medical treatment that makes him a genius.  Why is this heartbreaking?  Because the fix is only temporary, and the genius must witness the beginning of his own intellectual decline, to where he was at at the start.  In "The Last Question," work on a computer over centuries finally gives an answer to the question of if there's a God - it's that very super-perfected computer.

Lucy gets her trigger to genius from a bag of powerful drugs that breaks in her stomach after she's beaten, which in turn happens after she's forced against her will to carry to the drugs (this is the uninspired part of the story).  How the drugs make her so smart is only slightly spelled out - it's based on a hormone that ignites growth in fetuses - but the interesting part of this is that Lucy becomes much more than a genius.  Her astonishing intellect is able to read minds and move matter, for example.

There's no reason at all in our current science that this would or should happen with an enormous increase in our intellect - except, I suppose, if we wanted to postulate a macro-quantum-mechanical mind-over-matter (this is not clearly suggested in the movie) - but it's still fun to see enacted on the screen, and Johansson puts in a good performance as Lucy, as does Morgan Freeman as the sage scientist.   My favorite scene is when our Lucy, already close to God-hood, travels back in time, and touches the original Lucy in prehistoric Africa, to get our whole human race going in the first place. In the immortal words of Desi Arnaz, "Lucy, Lucy, Lucy!"  Or maybe the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" should have been playing in the background.

Hey, I'm sucker for time travel in just about any form, so I'd recommend Lucy for that reason alone, as well as its contribution to the Keyes and Asimov themes.

 
Sierra Waters series, #1, time travel

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