Meander movie ending explained driver#

It’s not that he seems especially excited about the UCLA gig or happy to share it with her, rather that for the first time he’s trying to fit into a lifestyle that’s not of his choosing, and to make this situation work. The last time Charlie and Nicole were alone together, she challenged his selfishness when it came to discussions of where their family should live and he exploded, punching a hole in his living-room wall. He’s alone with Nicole, his former in-laws having shut the doors to their rooms to finish getting ready for the night. There’s a remarkable stillness to this moment. She smiles and hands him an oversized bed sheet so he can go trick-or-treating with Henry, his grandmother, and Nicole’s boyfriend: “It’s only good.”įor the two preceding hours, Charlie has regaled us with his own self-pity from a defensive crouch. “Oh,” Nicole says, her face colored by surprise. He tells Nicole that he’s taken a fellowship at UCLA to direct two plays. Cut to: a few months later, when he’s just arrived in Los Angeles.

Meander movie ending explained driver#

Baumbach’s script times our sympathy: Charlie was a bad husband in marriage and divorce, but we can’t help but feel bad for Adam Driver (big!) standing at a mic asking for someone to hold him too close, to sit in his chair. For an audience of his close friends, he sings “Being Alive” - breathlessly, desperately - at an open mic. Charlie doesn’t ever explicitly take responsibility for the problems in his marriage (does he still think that Nicole should be upset not that he fucked another woman, but that he had a laugh with her?), but he does tacitly understand that his marriage, like his divorce, doesn’t have a clear hero or villain. In the end, like most other Baumbach movies, someone flawed - usually intellectually sharp but emotionally obtuse - stops trying to bend every single other person or thing to their will. He fusses over her ideas about them as a couple like they’re a bad-faith read of a good text. Nicole says she was never really happy with Charlie, an admission that seems so totally opposite of his conception of their marriage. Their fundamental fight is over custody - whether their son, Henry, should live in New York with his dad or Los Angeles with his mom - but there are other festering wounds resulting from breaches in loyalty and perceived power imbalances. Via vicious attorneys, the couple exchanges barbs and jabs. Two scenes later, she moves across the country and vows to start a life with herself at the center, not her husband’s directing work. In the movie’s first scene, we meet Charlie and Nicole Barber, who are trying to work through the terms of a separation with a mediator Charlie is smug and Nicole is stubborn. You go through this, and some of the scenes are uncomfortable, and some are funny - and then suddenly it’s over.” “I don’t like when you necessarily know that this is the end of the movie,” Baumbach once told IndieWire about Squid. There’s something gentle about these endings, and the way they reflect real life. Kicking and Screaming closes with a declaration of love that’s as romantic as it is practical: Josh Hamilton tells Olivia d’Abo that he wishes they were already an old couple, so he could kiss her tenderly without being too forward. Instead of confronting his feelings about his once-successful, now mostly petulant father in The Squid and the Whale, Walt just sort of acknowledges them, and walks away. Instead, they just sort of meander: Frances Hallady spends her movie fretting over her future and whether her best friend is outgrowing her by the end, she’s warmly smiling at that friend from across a room, comfortable with the distance between them. Noah Baumbach’s characters never quite come to classically dramatic, life-altering resolutions. Spoiler alert: They do indeed end up getting divorced.