FILMS

MARRIAGE STORY A few years ago, Noah Baumbach fell into a groove. His earlier films The Squid And The Whale and Margot At The Wedding had been wry portraits of families at war. But as the director entered his forties, his films shifted focus onto younger people – in particular While We’re Young and Mistress America, which tapped into a fresh, funny, zeitgeisty spirit. However, Baumbach’s previous film The Meyerowitz Stories revisited the familial furies of his earlier films, as does Marriage Story, his new film, set around a devastating separation.

The Squid And The Whale, about the fallout from urban middle-class family breakdown, was largely assumed to be based on the rupture between his own parents – novelist Jonathan Baumbach and Georgia Brown, ex-film critic of The Village Voice, who divorced when Baumbach was 14 and his brother was nine. Marriage Story is autobiographical, too, drawing from Baumbach’s own