We caught Noah Baumbach‘s Marriage Story last night at…well, the Middleburg Film Festival schedule said 7:30 but it started at 8 pm. Par for the course. The second viewing played just as strongly for me as it did in Telluride six weeks ago, and Tatyana was deeply impressed. She prefers it to Kramer vs. Kramer, she said this morning.
The Best Actor competish is definitely between Adam Driver, who plays the diligent if stressed-out theatre director Charlie, and Joaquin Phoenix‘s Arthur Fleck. The latter is certainly the flashier, envelope-tearing contender while Driver’s performance is obviously more grounded in the recognizable day-to-day, and then there’s that scene where he sings Stephen Sondheim‘s “Being Alive.”
Baumbach showed up for a pre-screening bow and then returned for a q & a with John Horn.