Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain are a hot, moody couple in HBO's Scenes From A Marriage trailer
The HBO drama is based on Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish series of the same name
TV News Scenes from a Marriage
HBO has released the first trailer for upcoming drama Scenes From A Marriage. Written and directed by Hagai Levi, the limited series is an intimate exploration of a marriage pertaining to love, hatred, desire, monogamy, and divorce through the lens of an American couple, played by Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain.
Scenes From A Marriage is an English language remake of the 1973 Swedish miniseries of the same name. Bergman based it partly on his own experiences. It was then condensed into a theatrical version and won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. In that film, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson played central couple Marianne and Johan, whose marriage is examined over the course of 10 years. Chastain and Isaac will play their HBO counterparts.
The trailer kicks off with a bearded Isaac singing Monsters of Folk’s “The Sandman, The Brakeman, And Me” to their child. The song then acts as a voiceover as various heated interactions between him and his wife play out, from fighting to dancing to making out. It’s all very reminiscent of Noah Baumbach’s recent Netflix film, Marriage Story, which also drew from the Swedish series.
The HBO drama will also star Corey Stoll, Sunita Mani, Tovah Feldshuh, Lily Jane, Nicole Beharie, and Shirley Rumriek. Michelle Williams was originally set to star in the series but she dropped out and was replaced by Chastain, who is a good friend of Isaac since college. The duo have previously starred together in 2014's A Most Violent Year.
There is no release date for the show yet but it will premiere in September 2021.
69 Comments
Scene From A Marriage To Jessica Chastain
“Honey, how ‘bout a blowjob?”
“How about a 3 hour angry rant about why women don’t get paid as much as men?!”
“So…no blowjob?”
“Maybe for your birthday.”
Huh?
I am only going to allow this if they force these actors to remake Saraband in 32 years.
I’d like to think I could fix their marriage as their third.
You could save them money on their electric bill.
You mean as their precocious skateboarding kid named Spike who’s always ready with an irreverent one-liner?
And who could forget dear rat-boy.
What about Rami Malek?
Mmm hmmm… We know why you wanna be their third.
To fuck.
Yeah, I’d be down to give it a try, those are two beautiful humans.
well, light emitting diode…if you wind up where I think you’re gonna wind up just remember your safeword
Holy shit I’m so sick of Gen X’ers making movies and TV shows (or, in this case, remaking older movies) about their divorces. No one cares! Your take on marriage is not new or interesting, and your navel-gazing midlife ennui is probably the reason why your ex-spouse stopped loving you!
If only there was some way you could not watch this.
Here I am in the comments section of the AV Club, the website where people famously only comment on things that they have seen and enjoyed.
As long as people exist, there will be art about marriages and divorces, as it’s one of the most universal and powerful experiences in human life. The trick is finding something new to say. And not really since anyone watching can take away something that might help them in their own life. We possibly underrate the purpose of art being instructional.
Eh. I get that divorce happens and that it’s a big, emotional, disruptive life event for people, but there’s a very specific type of story about divorce – middle class, liberal white people who either live in a city or the wealthy suburbs of a city discovering that middle class American life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that they never do the things that brought them joy when they were young anymore, that they don’t recognize the person they married, who they used to be so in love with, anymore – that Hollywood (and middle brow novelists!) tells over and over and over again and I just find it to be incredibly tedious at this point. America is a big, diverse country, and if an artist wants to tell a story about divorce I just wish they’d tell one that we haven’t seen a million times before.
Gee it’s almost like these folks are discovering something about their way of life. How about your damn superhero shows where nothing bad ever happens, and you can get thrown into a building and get back up, throwing punches? Yeah I REALLY want to watch movies about something that not only doesn’t matter to me, or anyone else.
Aren’t these things that happen to people when marriages fall apart? This is akin to immediately dismissing a war movie because, fucking hell, guys in uniforms running around and shooting each other over political and sociological differences?! Again??! When will they stop with this shit?!
Yeah I think most war movies are lazy and cliched, and it’s a pleasant surprise when one has something new and interesting to say about either the experience of war or war as a metaphor. Like, Da 5 Bloods had something unique to say about the Vietnam War because it focused on black veterans in a way that no mainstream movie about that war had before, but that was probably the first remotely good Vietnam movie in over 30 years. Similarly I think it would really take something special to make me watch another movie about WWII or the Holocaust.
Gotcha. I can see how that would be annoying. I’ll just mention that Marriage Story was my favorite film from its year. But, yeah, we need to see all kinds of marriage stories, especially those from the non bougie classes.
I am quite sure Gen X is sick of watching movies about your generation’s issues…
I agree with you, except this Hagai Levi dude is a boomer. Isaacs and Chastain are Xers…
No one cares! I mean, people watch them…?
Do they? I think that the audience for this, Marriage Story, Divorced, etc. is in reality a fairly small population of overwhelmingly white, upper middle class people who, through their gross overrepresentation among film and TV critics, pop culture websites, and Twitter super-users create a mirage that this shit is more popular than it really is.
If people didn’t watch them, they wouldn’t make money, and they wouldn’t get made. But people do watch them. People, with different interests than you (!), are interested in watching them, so they do make money. So they get made. It’s the same principle for every product. Personally, I think it’s great that people who like things I don’t get to enjoy them, because it’s more likely that I’ll get to enjoy things that other people don’t enjoy. It’s a win-win!
Well I’m sure there will be some serious ACTING in this.
Meryl Streep’s 72, so she probably only has another 15 years max and would need to pass the torch to the next generation.
I really loved the original Swedish Scenes From A Marriage but it was heavy to watch and that was before my own marriage breakup. I never made it all the way through Marriage Story so idk about this one. We’ll see.
Why the F*&K do people like watching movies and tv series about bad marriages and divorce? I have hated this s$#t since I watched Kramer vs Kramer as a little kid in the middle of my parents divorce. I, and many others are trying to keep our own marriages from exploding, I certainly do not want to watch it play out on the TV. Good for those that enjoy it. Not for me, I will take some escapism from the drudge of real life please.
Hey, same for me – I watched “Kramer vs. Kramer” in the theater, seated next to my father who had recently divorced my mother and moved to another city so he could marry a different woman. It was excruciating, and I’ve been careful to avoid divorce dramas ever since – they dredge up a lot of stuff I prefer to keep buried.
I used to love “Kramer vs. Kramer” until I got married and we had kids. Now it plays like a horror story. It’s hard for me to watch it, as great as it is.
Yeah , “the annoying as hell middle class couple arguing” genre has always been one of the worst things out there..
Y’ need a suicidal Timothy Hutton is what ya need.
What they need is an 80s era CGI Schwarzenegger inserted into every mopey scene shout “STAAAHHP ITT..STAAAHP WHINING!!!” and slapping them in the face.
Fwiw, Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage is light years better than Kramer vs. Kramer. The former is a moving, humane, complicated work of art; the latter is a misogynist screed that is way too eager to be a water cooler conversation. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if this remake is anywhere near as good as Bergman’s original, but I’ll be absolutely stunned if it’s not better than Kramer vs. Kramer.
I’m surprised Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep weren’t sharp enough to catch that. But I’m sure they heard all about it later around the water cooler. Benton would have been well-advised to recognize that no woman – except for my own grandmother – ever abandoned her children so her unprepared husband could raise them on his own.
Some of us grew up in stable households and things like this don’t raise issues for us. That said, I don’t really enjoy watching people with bad marriages either (unless there are somehow zombies or vampires involved).
I don’t really enjoy watching people with bad marriages either (unless there are somehow zombies or vampires involved)
There are always zombies and vampires involved in a bad relationship, and according to my exes I’ve been both.
Many see entertainment as escapism. I tend to think of it as an opportunity to experience and understand a perspective not my own. I’m not in a failing marriage, and the things that might occur to me to happen as a result of being in one, or conversely that may not, are bound by my experiences and perspective. So watching fictional people, ideally written well, traverse an experience is interesting to me, and if those characters are both well portrayed, and the story is good (as in it fulfills the functions of a story well) I might form an emotional connection to the experience, and learn something from it, or at least have a reaction that will cause me to think about my perspective, and whether it needs to be adjusted. Good art makes you question what you know, because it suggests or reinforces that. That experience is enjoyable to many.
The concept that movies can be nothing but sheer escapism has decimated the possibilities of what you can see in a theater. You can still find other types of films via cable and streaming services, of course. But good luck if you’re looking to find something like Taxi Driver or Chinatown in an actual theater. That’s really sad to me. There’s room for so much more, but now that the studios want every film to make $200-million, at a minimum, that’s that. Here come the special effects.
It always feels very ‘70s and ‘80s to me – just the stylistic tone, not the marriage breakdowns, obviously. I agree about not being interested. And I thought HBO had a show like this just a year or two ago with Sarah Jessica Parker.
another one I have a hard time watching is the War of the Roses. That was much more over the top than Kramer vs Kramer but having seen firsthand how shitty formerly married people can be to each other, it’s still a tough watch. I don’t get why the studios aren’t pumping out more mindless crap than this; we just came out of a fucking pandemic, I don’t need stuff like this, I need “Tiger King Part 2″ or something like that.
Because the personal turmoil of well-off, impossibly hot middle aged white people is a Very Important Issue of course!
For some, it helps them realize their marriage is not so bad. For others it reminds them that all marriages can be rocky. For some its a wake up call to end it, for others its a rally cry to fix it. My marriage hit a really rough patch a few years back and part of our couples therapy homework was to watch some of these “marriage in turmoil” movies and discuss them with each other. Its all fake Hollywood BS but I guess it could help some couples. My wife and I bonded over the fact that many movies on the list we were given were complete crap and as movie snobs we just sat their and ripped apart how bad they were. Of course doing that forced us to take time away from our lives and spend it with each other(which was honestly what was causing most of the friction) so it ended up working and helping us through a rough patch. So maybe there is something to it.
So we got Adam Driver in Marriage Story, Oscar Isaac in this, when is Daisy Ridley’s marriage movie coming out?
Hey, a Jessica Chastain role this year where she LOOKS like Jessica Chastain!
Thank god somebody’s finally going to do this right after that hack Ingmar Bergman made such a mess of it.
He really screwed it up by not having any Sum 41 on the soundtrack.
They’re snuggling, and what this movie supposes is…maybe they shouldn’t
It doesn’t look like a very happy snuggle though, does it?
Count me in, as long as there’s a generous helping of full penetration.
Always love to see a Towering Inferno-style lower-left/upper-right cast listing
Which is which?
HBO Max: Walking that fine line between shows about the “human condition” and “misery porn.”
I know it is supposed to be beautiful and all, but I found “Scenes from a Marriage” to be a dark slog…if not as patently Strindbergian as “Shame” was (basically Bergman’s “Straw Dogs”). One thing I’d like to see changed is: in these movies it’s always the woman’s fault. In “Blue Valentine” she ruins the guy’s life and takes his kid for NO REASON. In “Marriage Story” they shade that there is shared blame, but then she takes the kid across the country and we later found out she did the Tony Soprano thing of going to every divorce lawyer so he couldn’t use them. Kramer v. Kramer is addressed elsewhere in this comment thread. Also, don’t watch “A Most Violent Year,” it’s terribly boring.
Wait, no reason? He was a drunk pushy asshole who punched out her boss and got her fired from her job.
her boss who was trying to fuck her? that happens well into the movie, as a result, although you probably think it justifies everything that came before it. I wasn’t saying it was a debate, I was saying the script unfairly stacked the deck against her. Like in Marriage Story one day she just >click< decides to take away the kid (he is raising despite not being the father) and totally destroy his life because he isn’t “ambitious enough.”
I mean lots of women have creeps for bosses and that is in no way okay, but beating him up and getting her fired was not remotely helpful. I didn’t see Marriage Story, but it seemed pretty clear when I watched Blue Valentine that Gosling’s character was immature, manipulative and selfish right from the beginning and Williams’ character would have been better off never having met him.
You’re not quite getting my POV I think? I’m not saying that’s helpful, it’s nuts, I’m saying that the movie posits it as “this is what she pushed him to.” Seeing Gosling’s character as “immature, manipulative and selfish” is not wrong (even if the movie has him raising another man’s child), but are you sure that’s how the movie views him? btw, there is a long line of movies where the woman is crazy or heartless and the script hints at the guy being worse in real life than he is portrayed in the movie but ultimately he’s the screenwriter so he gets to make her a plot device. A great example is Turks Fruit or Turkish Delight by Verhoeven, apparently it’s based on a book based on the writer’s real life relationship…except he was a crazy paranoid psycho in real life and that’s why their romance was actually “doomed.” I sort of get the feeling this might be the basis of a lot of MPDGs who have to die at the end of the movie to make the milquetoast guy really appreciate his white collar job. 500 Days of Summer played with this concept a bit by making it pretty clear the main character is a solipsistic prick, but that’s nothing compared to all of the neckbeard scripts where it’s pretty clear the writer is getting revenge on his ex. Just saying (and with ZERO proof), Blue Valentine reeks of a true-life backstory where the person Ryan Gosling is based on was abusive or abused hard drugs and somebody decided to make him a blue collar saint who just has a few too many tallboys and is wronged by an uppity professional woman instead. The misogynistic throughline is that one day >snap< she’ll just decide she doesn’t love you and take your kid, it’s like an emotional snuff film.
I mean I’m far from arguing that there isn’t a huge strain of misogyny in a lot of movies in general and romcoms in particular, I’m just not seeing it in Blue Valentine. I’m just thinking about scenes where he threatens to kill himself if she won’t go out on a date with him, or when he throws a screaming fit at her because she happened to run into her ex in a parking lot and then expects her to have sex with him afterward. I will say it’s been a while since I watched it, but my impression was that the guy was a mess and the writers were well aware of it, even if they didn’t go out of their way to hit us over the head with it.
That’s more self-awareness than I credited it with at the time, but I have also not seen it since release and don’t plan to because…didn’t like it. I looked at the wayback old AVClub review/thread of it and funnily these same things came up including if he is a slacker and 500 Days of Summer. Anyway yaddayaddayadda I felt like he was framed as more “misunderstood” or “troubled” and she was more “heartless” (I am pretty sure the remedy she decided on from the start was to entirely cut him out of the child’s life?). It just seemed like cryptomisogyny, them wimmens gonna take your chillen, the script stacked the deck against her like it stacks the deck against ScarJo in Marriage Story where his screaming “Every day I wake up and I hope you’re dead” moment is presented as an outburst…and maybe I’m being unfair because one of the main things he complains about in that speech is that he missed out on banging more people in his 20s which is not a great look…but with her absconding across the country with the kid and forcing him to move and the lawyer thing it does seem like the script is stacked against her. Playing into those “I’m taking your kid away” or “it’s not your kid” type things feels kind of scary these days when you acknowledge how often those things lead to male violence. I hope this remake of Scenes From a Marriage breaks the cycle and at least makes it a fair fight of who’s the bigger but relatable jerk!
Did you ever see the remake of Scenes from a Marriage? Well worth checking out…
I don’t normally listen to techno, but this slaps
I don’t think Bergman is the type of director you remake. His films were so much him that it’s hard to imagine them without him. It would be like having someone remake Eraserhead.
Last House on the Left?
A Little Night Music?
The Touch 2: Tokyo 2ouch?
The Eighth Seal: The Next Day?
Ugh. The original is beyond perfect and destriys me every time I see it. These people are fine, but maaaan, a remake in not needed.I wouldn’t want to be Chastain going up against Liv Ullman’s performance in that final scene…
I just remembered that they were both in A Most Violent Year, which I really enjoyed, so maybe this will be watchable.