Marriage Story, the latest critically acclaimed Hollywood offering on family life, garnered six Oscar nominations this week, one sign of its popularity in the industry. But as good as it is to watch in purely dramatic terms, the movie ends up painting a bleak, dispiriting, and unrepresentative portrait of marriage today, not only in the nation at large but even in Hollywood. The movie tells the story of a marriage between a New York director, the Adam Driver character, and a Los Angeles actress, the Scarlett Johansson character, unraveling over work–family tensions — Should we live in New York or LA? Does his career come first or does hers? — and the kind of minor emotional drama that plays out in most marriages, with a young son caught up in the emotional and practical turmoil that unfolds as they end up in divorce court. So, basically, what we have here is a movie about a marriage coming apart for no good reason, literally in (West) Hollywood.
The movie is but the latest offering in a long line of movies and shows — from The Graduate to Friends to Single Parents — from an industry that mostly shies away from depicting stably married families in a positive light, and spotlights, more often than not, the rise of diverse families that depart from the traditional intact-family model. Hollywood’s offerings are also emblematic of the larger cultural and legal role that California has played in pioneering and amplifying particular cultural values — e.g., from individual fulfillment to “if-it-feels-good-do-it-ism” to easy divorce — that have undercut stable marriage across the nation. After all, no-fault divorce was invented by California, signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan just over 50 years ago, before being exported across the United States, to the detriment of kids across America.
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