You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this film we meet Nicole and Charlie (Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver) and their eight-year-old son Henry. We soon learn that the couple are divorcing and we follow the story of their marriage breaking up. The parents both work in the theatre in New York, but Nicole has been offered work in Los Angeles which means she can move back into her family home with her mother and sister. Here the viewer is presented with the ostensible reason for Nicole's desire to leave Charlie. She feels she has been sidelined by him for many years; that he has failed to respond to her wishes; and that he has selfishly followed his own desires, including having an affair with a colleague, whilst not acting on her wish to move back to California. Nicole believes she has “got smaller” in the relationship. Charlie is baffled by this, asserting that he thought he had been pursuing career goals in both their interests. One of the themes of the film emerges early: how can individual desires and wishes be reconciled with the requirement for compromise implied in being in an intimate relationship with another person?
There is a brief visit to a male, couple therapist. It's brief because Nicole walks out of the session, experiencing the therapist as siding with her husband. This may be because Nicole feels vulnerable and guilty as the instigator of the divorce, and she might carry a particular sensitivity to a patriarchal world that she maintains has impinged on her desires. Alternatively, it may be that something about the couple dynamic is swaying the therapist's mind, making it difficult for him to maintain a “couple state of mind”:
Holding a couple state of mind is important so that without having to spell it out, the couple has an experience of there being room for both of them…. (Morgan, 2019, p. 39)
Nicole's abandonment of the therapy may possibly also relate to the therapist appearing slightly “tone-deaf” to what the couple is bringing. He insists on beginning the session with what he c