The Education of Sadness in Marriage Story
After recently watching Marriage Story on Netflix, it provoked me to reflect on sadness, the role it plays in art, and how it affects our lives. Many times movies are consumed as pure entertainment, but often they are made with the intention of being more. Most serious film makers see their movies as artwork.
But, if movies are actually pieces of artwork and not just pure entertainment, then they do not have to always feel good. Sometimes sadness is the best way to draw us nearer to the Truth, which is the ultimate goal of art.
Sadness is an education of the heart, and sometimes we need to be educated- despite the pain. This does not mean that you have to watch sad movies, but I want to argue that they can be worthwhile, and that sadness can play a positive role in our lives if we let it.
The best treatment of sadness as a concept that I have read comes from Julián Carrón’s Disarming Beauty, which relies heavily on Luigi Giussani’s The Religious Sense. Carrón writes:
“Acknowledging the mystery that we are leads us to understand what we find inside ourselves, which oftentimes bothers us, like sadness: ‘great sadness, that fundamental characteristic of a life lived with awareness. St. Thomas defined this sadness as ‘the desire for an absent good.’’ When I feel sadness, it is because I desire a good that is still absent. Then, ‘to be aware of the value of such sadness is to be conscious of the greatness of life and to intuit life’s destiny.’”
Julián Carrón, Disarming Beauty
If Carrón is correct about this, then sadness can be useful. The lack shows us with more clarity the truth of what we are made for. Where pain and evil abound, we come to know more clearly that we are made for health and goodness. We know with every fiber of our being what the Truth actually is.
Even the inadequacy of life can teach us of our true eternal destiny. Carrón cites the famous poet Giacomo Leopardi, saying:
“The inability to be satisfied by any worldly thing, or so to speak, by the entire world… to accuse things always of being inadequate and meaningless; to suffer want, emptiness, and hence noia— this seems to me the chief sign of the grandeur and nobility of human nature.”
Giacomo Leopardi, quoted in Disarming Beauty
This reality is undeniable- even life at it’s best can leave us with a heart-wrenching longing for more truth, more beauty, and evermore goodness. All of this inadequacy implicitly suggests an eternal answer to the longings. Because of this, sadness and suffering are not meaningless, but are full of meaning, pointing towards the fullness we as humans are made for.
So, how does this idea transfer to the movies? If sadness in life teaches us what we are truly made for and show us our true worth and destiny, movies can do the same. When we feel the pain of heartbreak or see disgusting violence in movies, we inherently desire wrongs to be made right. We see and experience lack in movies, and it stirs up a desire for fullness and perfection in us. By our nature we cannot help but desire it.
In order to demonstrate this idea, we can bring it back to Marriage Story. I actually didn’t know what to expect when starting this movie, as I did not watch the trailer, but only heard that it was masterfully acted and was gaining Oscar buzz.
What I found was a thoughtful, extremely well made, but ultimately heartbreaking portrait of a couple going through divorce. Adam Driver plays Charlie and Scarlett Johansson plays Nicole- an aspiring theater director and actress respectively. They met through their involvement in theatre and their relationship is inseparable from it, but eventually their egos pull them apart. Charlie is absorbed in his theater company, while Nicole wants more for herself, as she feels she has lived doing whatever Charlie wanted for too long.
In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Driver describes the movie saying “[Director Noah Baumbach] wanted to tell the story of their relationship, almost from its beginning through the lense of a divorce- telling a love story through the scope of its ending.” This line is so interesting to me, because it sounds like a paradox- to tell a story of fullness through the lens of lack. It seems like a contradiction, but this is precisely what the education of sadness is about.
Marriage Story opens with two beautiful monologues by Charlie and Nicole describing why they love each other. These monologues are the perfect example of what marriage is supposed to be: unconditional love of the whole person, despite quirks and imperfections in the other. When the monologues cease, we find that they were written for a marriage counseling session, as the marriage is failing.
The sadness that this movie inevitably stirs up in our hearts points to what true marriage is supposed to be. It is worth noting that this education would never take place if this film were distant from reality and overly idealistic. If it only gave us good feelings, we would have a false view of what marriage can and should be.
If we look at the lack represented in Marriage Story, it forces us to contemplate the opposite of what is depicted. We find that marriage is supposed to be (though it is not an all encompassing list) selfless, lasting, and faithful.
- Selfless
Both Charlie and Nicole show us in this movie how not to be selfless, but especially Charlie. Charlie is so absorbed in his work and personal milestones that he completely loses sight of the needs of his wife.
Nicole on the other hand feels so neglected that she rejects Charlie as her husband because of his faults. Though her character is more relatable, the selfishness that she feels from Charlie only breeds selfishness in her.
If love is choosing the good of the other person, then we see how short they fall of the mark, and as a viewer it is painful to watch. Through their obvious selfishness, we see that marriage is supposed to be a place of selflessness. Every glimmer of selfless love they flash in the movie draws us in, simply because it is so contrasted with what we see throughout the whole movie.
- Faithful
About a quarter way through the movie, it is hinted that Charlie slept with another woman in the theater company, and later in the movie this idea is confirmed. After we learn this and the reasons he chose to do it, we immediately side with Nicole. We can’t help but do this, human love is oriented toward faithfulness. No one wants to be used or forgotten.
Again, despite Nicole finding a new partner at the end of the movie, we feel they never should have separated. We can intuit the love they still have for one another despite being divorced.
All of these emotions stirred up from unfaithfulness point us to the fact that we are made for faithful relationships.
- Lasting
Finally, Marriage Story teaches us that love is supposed to be lasting. The mere fact that this couple who clearly love each other so much are separating breaks our heart. It’s pointing us to the fact that we desire lasting relationships. No one wants to fall out of love or lose their best friend, but when it happens, it reaffirms us that we are not made for this falling out. We are made for relationships that last forever, and continue to grow constantly.
This is beautifully demonstrated by the fact that the movie is bookended with readings of their love letters to each other. Despite everything they have been through, that love still remains.
Each scene either follows or precedes a scene that reminds us of the grim reality of their state of affairs, but through all of the pain and sorrow, we are given glimmers that these two continue to love each other and always will.
Their love has been ingrained into their very person. Nicole continues to cut Charlie’s hair, order food for him when he can’t decide what to order, and Charlie continues to look affectionately at Nicole. Adam Driver summed up these ideas in an interview with Nightline, saying,
“It’s kind of naming things clinically that you feel intuitively in a marriage. You know someone so well, that you’re changing your molecules inside to think about them a different way. That love doesn’t go away, it transitions into this other thing.”
Adam Driver, ABC News
We feel this love Charlie still has when he bares his heart singing “Being Alive,” from the musical Company. The seemingly painful parts of marriage have now become beautiful longings and things he misses:
“Somebody hold me too close / Somebody hurt me too deep / Somebody sit in my chair / And ruin my sleep / And make me aware of being alive / Being alive
Make me confused, mock me with praise / Make me feel used, vary my days / But alone is alone, not alive”
Again Driver can see clearly what the director was doing writing this song into the script: “It’s only through singing the lyrics of someone else’s work- a song about someone who doesn’t want love, and now for the first time realizes that that’s all they want- does he begin to mourn what he’s lost.”
Charlie has seemingly had to go through a divorce to recognize the true love he has for his wife, and to understand what love is truly supposed to be: selfless, faithful, lasting. He had to undergo the death of love (the lack) in order to understand the greatness of his capacity to love (the fullness).
Though this is not an entertaining movie to watch, and it tears us apart as we watch it, it is nonetheless beautiful. It is brimming with meaning, and it truly educates our hearts if we let it. Sometimes the best educator our hearts can have is the lack, the sadness of loss, and the pains of life. In order to understand what we are missing in our heart, we have to lose something. This is true both in life, and in sorrowful cinema, as Marriage Story beautifully depicts.
