Mar­riage Sto­ry final­ly gets Sond­heim right on screen

Hol­ly­wood has nev­er done right by Stephen Sond­heim. The peer­less writer of sem­i­nal musi­cals like ​‘Com­pa­ny’ and ​‘Sun­day in the Park with George’ has seen his work adapt­ed many times over the years, with mixed results. Although there’s still a healthy appetite for Sond­heim adap­ta­tions (Steven Spielberg’s upcom­ing West Side Sto­ry and Richard Linklater’s adap­ta­tion of Mer­ri­ly We Roll Along attest to this), the likes of Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd and Disney’s Into the Woods have thrown into ques­tion the suit­abil­i­ty of Sondheim’s work for the mass mar­ket of cinema.

His ambi­tious ​“con­cept” musi­cals, which typ­i­cal­ly eschew straight­for­ward plot­lines and con­tain chal­leng­ing lyrics and inno­v­a­tive, unpre­dictable har­monies, have made him a god among musi­cal the­atre devo­tees. But his work leaves some peo­ple cold (a pro­duc­er in ​‘Mer­ri­ly We Roll Along’ sings: ​“What’s wrong with let­ting ​’em tap their toes a bit? / I’ll let you know when Stravin­sky has a hit”). Noth­ing about Sond­heim seems to fit the crowd-pleas­ing rudi­ments of filmic adap­ta­tion. Now, how­ev­er, there is Mar­riage Sto­ry.

Writ­ten and direct­ed by Noah Baum­bach, Mar­riage Sto­ry an intense two-han­der about a divorc­ing cou­ple, played by Adam Dri­ver and Scar­lett Johans­son. Towards the end of the film, as the pair come to terms with their sep­a­ra­tion, they each per­form a num­ber from the musi­cal ​‘Com­pa­ny’: Nicole does ​‘You Could Dri­ve a Per­son Crazy’ while Char­lie sings ​‘Being Alive’. The per­for­mances rep­re­sent some of the finest inter­pre­ta­tions of Sond­heim ever seen on-screen, cap­tur­ing the rich­ness and emo­tion of the lyrics and, in recon­tex­tu­al­is­ing them, adding new meaning.

‘You Could Dri­ve a Per­son Crazy’ is an osten­si­bly light-heart­ed song, bid­ding good­bye to bad rub­bish. In the con­text of ​‘Com­pa­ny’, this bad rub­bish is Bob­by, the com­mit­ment-pho­bic sin­gle­ton whose rela­tion­ship issues form the basis for the musical’s loose plot. The num­ber is per­formed by three of Bobby’s girl­friends, and its flip­pant, sing-song lyrics only half-mask the bit­ter­ness and dis­ap­point­ment underneath.

Where­as in ​‘Com­pa­ny’ the tune is sung direct­ly to its incon­sid­er­ate male sub­ject, in Mar­riage Sto­ry Nicole sings it at a par­ty sur­round­ed by friends. It’s a lark, but also a per­sua­sive dis­play. Moments pri­or, her lawyer reveals that she has won Nicole the frac­tion­al­ly bet­ter side of a child cus­tody deal. When she sings, Nicole is per­form­ing the idea that she has ​‘won’ the divorce, and is freer and hap­pi­er in her new life. From her ren­di­tion we are giv­en a taste of Nicole’s (and Johansson’s) extra­or­di­nary charis­ma; her tal­ent, which had been dis­par­aged and neglect­ed dur­ing her mar­riage to Char­lie, is vindicated.

Nicole’s ver­sion also draws out the song’s dark­er ele­ments, its griev­ances and insin­cer­i­ties. The punch­line (“Bob­by is my hob­by and I’m giv­ing it up!”) is deliv­ered as a joke but, hav­ing spent the bet­ter part of two hours watch­ing Nicole run her psy­che through the emo­tion­al shred­der, we know ​“hob­by” couldn’t be fur­ther from the truth.

‘Being Alive’, on the oth­er hand, is no vic­to­ry march. Sung at the cli­max of ​‘Com­pa­ny’, it finds Bob­by reflect­ing on love and rela­tion­ships, pour­ing out his soul with a com­pli­cat­ed (and pre­vi­ous­ly unseen) vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. When Char­lie takes up the micro­phone in a piano bar, he starts, like Nicole, some­what jok­ing­ly. He voic­es the oth­er char­ac­ters’ spo­ken asides, approx­i­mat­ing the voic­es and accents from the orig­i­nal cast record­ing (nowhere does Baum­bach bet­ter sell the authen­tic­i­ty of Charlie’s the­atre career than in this moment). But, as Bob­by does in the orig­i­nal song, Char­lie soon com­mits to the con­fes­sion, and by the song’s des­per­ate­ly earnest final note, Char­lie is exposed. It’s a ter­rif­ic piece of act­ing by Dri­ver, and a neat way of re-stag­ing Sondheim’s song as naturalism.

We’ve already seen a dif­fer­ent Sond­heim lyric re-pur­posed for the screen in 2019: the dark bal­lad ​’Unwor­thy of Your Love’ from ​‘Assas­sins’ is per­formed by Ben Platt and Zoey Deutch in the Net­flix series The Politi­cian. Deutch and Platt are bet­ter, smoother singers than Dri­ver and Johans­son; the song is super­fi­cial­ly enter­tain­ing. In ​‘Assas­sins’, how­ev­er, the roman­tic duet is sung by pres­i­den­tial attack­ers John Hinck­ley Jr and Lynette ​“Squeaky” Fromme, and direct­ed at their respec­tive idols, Jodie Fos­ter and Charles Man­son. It’s not a love song but a bal­lad of tox­ic obses­sion. In trans­pos­ing it, as The Politi­cian does, to the tamer con­text of a school hall recital, much of the depth and emo­tion­al speci­fici­ty is lost.

Ulti­mate­ly, the same can­not be said of Baumbach’s film. The two ​‘Com­pa­ny’ num­bers are as vital to under­stand­ing the mean­ing of Mar­riage Sto­ry as ​‘A Street­car Named Desire’ is to under­stand­ing Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Moth­er. In hand­ing the songs to Char­lie and Nicole, Baum­bach teas­es out the uni­ver­sal truths of the lyrics, even in the process of apply­ing them to a dif­fer­ent con­text. It is inter­tex­tu­al col­lag­ing at its most deft, using one piece of art to deep­en anoth­er. What’s more, it final­ly puts Sondheim’s bril­liance on screen for all to see.