Marriage Story: An Unhappy Ending!

I really liked Noah Baumbach's movie about his parents' divorce from a child's perspective ("The Squid and the Whale" – 2005). Now, writer/director Baumbach has a new film out, chronicling divorce from the adult's perspective. It's a very good screenplay and the acting by the two leads is excellent. It's on Netflix now! I liked the film, just not as much as most of the critics did. (It is on just about all the Top 10 lists, but it won't make mine.) I felt it was missing something (but what the something is, I haven't yet figured out – I guess the missing "something" is still missing!) Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) have been married for about ten years. They have one son. Charlie thinks everything is okay when Nicole unexpectedly tells him that she wants a divorce. Charlie wants to try to work things out, but Nicole is done! They still love each other, but Nicole feels she has sacrificed far too much for Charlie. She needs to move from NYC (where they currently reside) back to LA, where she has the opportunity to star in a new TV show. Charlie runs a theatre group in NYC, and wants to remain living there. He is very well respected for his top-notch directing talent. Both of them are likeable and there's no villain here. Divorce brings out the worst in people, and this film does a really nice job of realistically showing how that happens (such as sharing a secret about negative behavior of your mate in order to get the upper hand in a custody dispute, or going for the jugular in an argument that devastates your partner). The film also shows how crazy a seemingly straight-forward divorce situation, with two reasonably normal people, can go "off-the-rails" once attorneys get involved. (Laura Dern as Nora Fanshaw, Esq is fantastic and her supporting actress performance is AAW.) I felt sad when the film ended, not just because divorce is a sad situation for everyone involved, but also because I thought their marriage was still viable if each side was only willing to compromise a little more.