Reviews

Spoilers! With no knowledge of the novel the series followed, all I can say is that i thought it was very well done but for two points: the references to "America" were more like an unwanted advertisement than an element in the story, and the final execution of Jan was shown in an entirely tasteless, excessive manor even for such a violent film as this.

Marriage Story has a lot going for it including a great cast - with the smaller roles being the most fun - like Alan Alda - but (spoiler here) the dialogue in the scene where the couple each lose it and scream at each other came across to me as too contrived, and not even believable "I wish you would die!" considering that the actual circumstances of the dissolving relationship are pretty tame. Another minor criticism is that for me, the injection of two theatre songs from Stephen Sondheim were off. This is a film, not a play. The scenes work in the sense that the husband and wife playing them are a stage actress and a stage director in the story, fine, but they fall flat for me, perhaps underlining the difference between what is good on the stage and what is good on the screen. Theatre goers may love those scenes but they yanked me right out of the film. All in all, enjoyable but not nearly great.

A great real-life story, truly worth seeing. But I feel the film maker didn't do a proper job of explaining to the viewers the nature of the diving, of the equipment, that would have improved the viewer's appreciation and understanding of the events. I would have expected a thorough telling, including even some diagrams to show how the various elements of the job and equipment worked, and of course there was some of that, but there were big gaps as well. The diving bell is lowered from the ship on some kind of cable or tether, but does it have its own ability to move itself at all? Is it like a submarine with some propellers and a way to have those on board guide it towards its target? Apparently not, which is a bit hard to believe, because I suppose (but I shouldn't have to guess) that it is just hanging, swinging, rather perilously from the ship, is lowered 100 meters, and... does it rest on the ocean floor, so that it keeps its position when the divers depart from it, connected to the bell with a tether, to do their work? Inexplicably, no, it just hangs in the water, in the current. We see that the divers exit the bell from the bottom, so if the bell were to rest on the ocean floor it would need to have a barrier, a kind of footing, designed to keep the housing off of the floor to allow the divers room to exit, and in fact there was a structure beneath the bell that could have played this role, but in the end I don't think the bell sat on the ocean floor, although this was never explained as I recall. This is incredible because when the ship loses its automatic guidance system, which effectively use the ship's propellers and rudders to keep it in a continual fixed point above the working target, during very rough conditions, and rapidly begins to be pushed away from the worksite, the diving bell is dragged off with it, which in turn drags the unwitting divers along as well, and the viewer is asking themselves "Really? Is this operation so exposed to such a clearly foreseeable disaster?" And as we see how fast the rather large ship is pulled off from the job site, why on earth doesn't it appear that the divers are being yanked to bits along with it? The diver whose tether does not break is even able to haul himself back up to the bell (through the force of the current, which is compounded by the ship's movement pulling both the bell and diver along) with nothing but his two arms, no diving fins are worn that could help at least a bit, and the diving suit is heavy - how was he able to do that? The viewer has no answer. Another thing that was never mentioned and which is so clearly obvious is why the ship did not maintain its position above the worksite the way every other boat or ship does when it wants to stop and stay in one place: by dropping anchor? Why use valuable fuel and depend on the guidance system to stay put when, quite conceivably, the ship could have dropped an anchor or two, or more, and accomplished the same thing? The viewer has no idea. If they have cables long enough on board from which to hang the diving bell, why not hang anchors from such cable instead? Another mystery here. And why did life on the bell, where the dive master is waiting, not also go completely haywire as the bell is dragged off course as both it and the ship are in free-float with the wind and waves? One would think the main in the bell would be knocked off his feet and would have to hang on against this constant motion, but instead it's all rather calm in the bell. Just astonishing. And why on earth did the crew wait some 20 minutes after the ship's computer driven guidance system crashed to try powering off and on again? It's the first thing one does when computers crash! I'm not the only one to mention this here. As I watched the film and the computers failed and the guidance system was cut and the ship began to drift, my first thought was "Grab the wheel, take over the engines and manually drive the ship back to the target! Fast! Before the divers are dragged away!" But do they do that? No! In fact, they wait, as I recall, and watch as if helpless, until we see the ship has indeed gone far off the mark, before finally doing just that. And the man responsible for operating the guidance system amazingly says that when the computers (all 3 of them) mysteriously failed, that the very difficult task of trying to manually drive the ship back to its work site was so difficult in part because they had never prepared for that, had never practiced this scenario before? What?? How on earth does that get missed in the "when things go wrong" preparations for such dangerous work? They never practiced this worst-case scenario before? My god! Is that even possible? "What if the guidance system crashes? Well, then we have to go manual. Okay, let's run a practice drill on that just in case it happens so we know how to do it live." ?? Of course they would, wouldn't they? But it appears not to be the case. So these are some of the astounding holes in the story from both the film maker's side and the side of the crew. Great adventure, but faulty story-telling.