就突然想练练翻译，不太纯熟，欢迎提提建议:)
搬运自New Yorker资深影评人 A. O. Scott的主页
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/movies/marriage-story-review.html
Dance Me to the End of Love
同我共舞至爱尽头
Traditionally, a story that ends in matrimony is classified as a comedy. But what about a story that begins with the end of a marriage? Noah Baumbach's tender and stinging new film, “Marriage Story,” doesn’t quite answer the question. It’s funny and sad, sometimes within a single scene, and it weaves a plot out of the messy collapse of a shared reality, trying to make music out of disharmony. The melody is full of heartbreak, loss and regret, but the song is too beautiful to be entirely melancholy.
习惯上，一个以婚礼为结局的故事总会被划分为喜剧，那么，一个以婚姻的结局为起点的故事该如何分类？Noah Baumbach的新作《婚姻生活》，温柔又刺痛，也没能真正给出回答。搞笑欢快的同时，这部电影又是伤感的，有时在同一个场景里，它在共享现实的混乱崩盘中编排剧情，试图从不和谐中找寻到乐音。这段旋律中充满心碎、失去与遗憾，但整首歌却不完全是悲哀的——只因它实在太过迷人。
Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) are an artistic couple living in Brooklyn with their 8-year-old son, Henry (the wonderful, deadpan Azhy Robertson). Both parents work in the theater: Nicole, a former teenage movie star (and a child of Hollywood), is a leading performer in the experimental stage company that Charlie, himself a sometime actor, directs. What we know of their life together is conveyed in an opening montage in which each partner, in turn, lists the things they love about the other. They’ve compiled these catalogs at the urging of the mediator hired to help them through their separation.
查理（Adam Driver饰）和妮可（Scarlett Johansson饰）是一对住在布鲁克林的艺术家夫妻，他们有一个八岁的儿子，叫亨利（天才般的冷面少年Azhy Robertson）。这对父母都在剧院工作：妮可曾经是青少年电影明星（好莱坞之女），如今在查理管理的实验性剧院中出演主角，查理自己有时也演演戏。影片开始时的蒙太奇中，他们各自轮番罗列着深爱对方的理由，我们凭此得以了解他们在一起时的生活状态。他们请了一位婚姻顾问来协助解决分居危机，搜集这类爱的名目只是为了迎合那位顾问的要求。
What follows — as an amicable split becomes a shattering rupture, lurching from awkwardness to rage in search of a new equilibrium — is a reversal of Tolstoy’s sturdy observation about happy and unhappy families. Happiness is unique, inexpressible, a state that exists outside of narrative. Misery is what makes you just like everyone else.
当友好分居变成了破碎决裂，尴尬晋升为狂怒，这段婚姻正跌跌撞撞地寻找着一种新的平衡，这之后的变故，却反转了陀思妥耶夫斯基对幸与不幸家庭的那番深刻剖析。幸福，是独特的，难以言说的，存在于叙事之外的一种状态；不幸，却只会让你沦为平平无奇的普通人。
This is certainly the perspective of the divorce lawyers who soon replace that hapless mediator. Nicole, who has a role on a television pilot, takes Henry to Los Angeles, where her sister (Merritt Wever), their mother (Julie Hagerty) and Henry’s cousins live. This move, which Charlie insists is temporary — “we’re a New York family,” he says to anyone who will listen — becomes a point of contention between the spouses and their attorneys. Papers are served. Voices are raised. Henry, whose well-being is supposedly everyone’s chief concern, is pulled back and forth, his life wrenched out of sync.
无疑，倒霉婚姻顾问的视角很快就被离婚律师们取代了。由于妮可打算在一电视剧试播集中演一个角色，她带着亨利一起搬去了洛杉矶，她的姐姐（Merritt Wever饰）、妈妈（Julie Hagerty饰）和亨利的几个表兄弟都住在那儿。尽管查理坚持对每个听故事的人都声称这次搬家是暂时的——“我们是纽约之家”，但搬家风波还是成了这对夫妻和他们辩护律师争辩的焦点。法院传票纷发，争吵声势愈猛。亨利的幸福理应是每个人的主要关注点，却在父母反复来回的撕扯中，同他的人生一样受到了重重阻碍。
Nicole and Charlie, onetime creative collaborators, become characters in a drama neither one controls. “We need to tell your story,” says Nora (Laura Dern), Nicole’s lawyer. Charlie visits two — a rumpled mensch (Alan Alda) and a shark in a suit (Ray Liotta) — and one of them urges him to “change the narrative.” For both parties (as they are called once their experiences are translated into legalese), this means rewriting a happy-couple past into a history of struggle.
妮可和查理，一度是才华洋溢搭档，却沦为一出失控闹剧中的可怜角色。“我们得说出你的故事。”妮可的律师诺拉（Laura Dern饰）这样说道。查理则见了两位律师，一位是不修边幅的体面人（Alan Alda饰），一位是衣冠楚楚的骗子（Ray Liotta饰），其中一人督促他“要掌控故事的说法”。对夫妻双方而言（当他们被传讯过一次，他们的经历旋即被翻译成了法律措辞），这意味着愉快的过往婚姻生活被重写成艰辛搏斗的历史。
The most painful parts of “Marriage Story” act out that revisionism, as idiosyncrasies are made to look pathological and mistakes are treated as potential crimes. The German social critic Theodor W. Adorno wrote that “divorce, even between good-natured, amiable, educated people, is apt to stir up a dust-cloud that covers and discolors all it touches,” an insight that Baumbach illustrates with vivid precision. He shows how “the sphere of intimacy” (to continue with Adorno) “is transformed into a malignant poison as soon as the relationship in which it flourished is broken off.”
《婚姻生活》中最痛苦的地方在于充分体现了一种修正主义，从这个角度来看，私人癖好被视为病态，微小错误被当成潜在犯罪。德国社会批评家西奥多・阿多诺写道：“离婚，能够轻易地扬起尘埃云团，所及之处，颜色尽褪，即便是脾性温和、平易近人、受过教育的两个人也不能幸免”。对此，Baumbach以不失生动的精准加以佐证。他展现了“亲密领域”（接着阿多诺的话讲）是如何“转化为恶意丛生的毒药——当生长其中的爱情戛然中断后”。
The intimacy doesn’t just vanish. At their moment of most intense conflict — when the thin line between love and hate seems to have been irrevocably crossed — Nicole still calls Charlie “honey.” There is still a residue of sweetness between them, which offers hope, not necessarily for reconciliation but for a limit to the damage each will inflict and sustain.
亲密感并不会凭空消失。即使是在冲突到了白热化阶段——无可回头地跨越爱与恨的一线之隔之际——妮可还是喊了查理一声“宝贝”。他们之间仍存留着爱意的残沫，这虽然没有给破镜重圆必然的希望，但却有望限制每一次争执给各自带来的伤害。
What is happening is catastrophic, ridiculous and also — as the lawyers know — perfectly ordinary. Baumbach, exploiting and extending the tremendous talents of his cast, refuses to exaggerate. There are spasms of farce and throbs of melodrama, but they arise within the rhythms of everyday behavior. Which is not to say that Nicole and Charlie are confined to the shabby, somber stagecraft that so often passes for realism. They are large, complicated personalities with professional and emotional lives that fill their days, and the screen, with anxiety, surprise and occasional delight.
所有正在上演的戏码都具有毁灭性的力量，是荒谬的，却也是——律师们最懂这点——再寻常不过的。导演Baumbach尽管极尽剥削之能来激发演员们身上巨大的才能，但同时拒绝丝毫过于夸张的表演。影片里充满闹剧式的筋挛与文艺片式的悸动，而这脱胎于生活中人们的行动，表现出它所应有的节奏。并不是说，妮可和查理这两个角色被限制在了某种陈旧灰暗的舞台剧之“术”中，表演出冒牌的现实主义；他们是重要且复杂立体的两个人，职业生涯与情感生活充斥着焦虑、惊喜与间或的愉快，这填充了他们共同的日子，也填充了我们的荧幕。
Baumbach works to be fair to both of them, and the effort shows. Like his other movies, perhaps even more so, this one feels personal. I don’t just mean autobiographical. In a few minutes on Google you can find out about his marriage, his parents, his in-laws and whatever else you want to know. That information only confirms what you have already intuited if you’ve seen“The Squid and the Whale,”“Margot at the Wedding,” “While We’re Young”or“The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Selected”: He draws from his own life.
Baumbach试图对他们俩一视同仁，他的努力显而易见。和他其他电影作品一样，这部电影——也许更甚——给人一种私人的体验。我指的不仅仅是它的自传性质。你在谷歌上能很方便地搜到有关他的婚姻、父母、岳父母，和你想知道的一切。如果你看过《鱿鱼和鲸》《婚礼上的玛格特》《年轻时候》《迈耶洛维茨的故事》，那么网上的所有与他相关的信息都只能确认你的直觉：他的创作来自亲身经历。
But you shouldn’t expect the picture to be perfectly objective or symmetrical. In some ways, “Marriage Story” is harder on Charlie than on Nicole, underlining his self-absorbed, self-pitying tendencies, but he also occupies the film’s sympathetic center of gravity. It understands him better, even as Nicole has plenty of chances to explain herself. She seems to be the one who precipitated the breakup, whose expectations and feelings changed in ways that Charlie struggles to comprehend. He is blind to some of the consequences of his own behavior, which includes cheating on Nicole with a member of the theater company.
不过，你可不能期待这拼凑出的想象完全客观，或与事实相符。某种程度上来说，《婚姻故事》里查理比妮可更惨一些，影片虽然一直在强调他自私又自哀的倾向，但却把他放在共情的重力场的中心。这能让他更好地被理解，正如妮可拥有无数自我辩解的机会。她似乎是一手促成分手的那一方，她的期望和情绪主导各个方面，查理只能挣扎着去理解和回应。他没能看见自己某些行为的直接后果，比如背着妮可跟剧院成员偷情。
The infidelity is treated as a sidebar, which isn’t entirely convincing. And while “Marriage Story” delves into the tangled thickets of its characters’ feelings, it is coy — or maybe just tactful — about their sexual lives, together and apart. Nicole has a moment of lust (following a moment of fury), but Charlie is, libidinally speaking, a closed book.
不太让人信服的是，私通事件只是被当成一个附带的小问题。另外，当《婚姻故事》深挖进入角色错综复杂的情感密丛时，它对这对夫妻的性生活却表现出了一种忸怩作态，或者说是过于圆滑的态度。妮可表现出过情欲（在狂怒之后），但查理，就欲望的力比多而言，让人看不透。
The complexity of the film’s perspective — what Baumbach reveals and what he withholds, how he keeps up with characters whose circumstances are changing rapidly even as they feel like they’re stuck — places enormous demands on Driver and Johansson, who are simply extraordinary. They are perfectly matched, which is to say interestingly mismatched, given the trajectory of the story. Each one has a charisma that’s a little mysterious, a hint of Cubism in their faces, an undertone of irony in their voices. How could they ever have expected to know each other?
影片视角的复杂性——Baumbach打算揭露什么，掩饰什么，在人物被困住，而形势瞬息万变时，他是如何跟上他们的节奏——对Driver和Johansson提出了极高的要求，但他们的表现实在太过出色。他们俩太配了，根据故事来讲，应该说他们很有趣地不太搭。他们每个人都有一种非凡的魅力，他们脸上有神秘的立体主义气质，言语里藏着讽刺的低音。他们俩一开始怎么会想到去认识了解对方呢？
One of the morals of this story, chastening but also oddly encouraging, is that we don’t ever really know one another, but we’re nonetheless obligated to try. Lawyers do it their way, insisting on simple answers to difficult questions. This is the place to note that Alda, Liotta and Dern collectively come close to stealing the movie, in part because they are playing performers fully in their element in ways that Charlie and Nicole are not.
故事的寓意之一，告诫同时又鼓舞人的是，我们从来没有真正地了解彼此，然而我们有责任去试着这样做。律师们有自己的路数来“了解”官司对象，坚持要他们用简短的答案来回答棘手的问题。需要注意的是这里Alda，Liotta和Dern共同企图吸引观众的目光，一定程度上是因为他们正在自己的领域中演戏，但是妮可和查理并没有在演。
We sometimes see those two at work — there are some delicious tidbits of backstage comedy, in both New York and Los Angeles — but rarely onstage. There are two important exceptions, moments of theater that use borrowed words and self-conscious artifice to deliver strong doses of unadorned feeling. Both involve songs from Stephen Sondheim’s “Company”:“You Could Drive a Person Crazy,”a jaunty complaint about falling for a charming narcissist; and“Being Alive,”a heartfelt lament about being one. That number, sung by Driver near the end of “Marriage Story,” is an anthem of need, building to the shattering realization that “alone is alone, not alive.”
有时候我们也能看到两人工作时的状态——纽约和洛杉矶的喜剧后台总有些趣闻——但不总在舞台上。这样的剧院时刻也有两处重要的例外，借用台词与自觉的手段来表达浓烈而未经修饰的情感。两处都用上了Stephen Sondheim的歌《陪伴》：《你会让人疯魔》，对爱上迷人的自恋狂的一段轻快的抱怨；《活着》，一首由心而发的有关独身的哀歌。影片快要结尾时，Driver唱的那首歌，是一首对于相互需要的赞歌，他一路唱到了“孤单只是孤单，不是活着”的心碎领悟。
That is a bleak conclusion, and it’s one that this meticulous and messy movie both acknowledges and resists. Bouncing between two large, opinionated American cities, Charlie and Nicole discover that other people are impossible and indispensable: children, colleagues, in-laws, exes, even sworn officers of the matrimonial bar. Alive is alive, not alone.
这个结论下得有些晦暗，却是这部混乱而慎重的电影在拒绝承认的同时，又不得不认同的一点。颠簸在两座自以为是的美国大都市之间，查理和妮可最终发现，其他人是如此难以忍受，又难以割弃：孩子，大学，亲家，前任，甚至还包括离婚法庭上宣过誓的司法人员们。活着只是活着，你不可能只是独自一人。
