Jessica Chastain / Oscar Isaac 'Scenes from a Marriage' HBO

Well Isaac better bring his A game because Michelle Williams is coming off a divorce and combined with the fact that she's TOTALLY FREAKIN' AWESOME I doubt she'll be dropping the ball on her end.

She really needs to get her film career straightened out to match the TV rolls (shout out merc!).......no 2020 project and in 2021 only "Venom: Let There Be Carnage" right now ........just like 18 months ago she had all these baity film projects and that needs to start soon - she turns 40 in a couple months.

That's the witching hour for American actresses!

HBO scooping up top actresses lately - Streep, Mirren, Pfeiffer, Fran - and upcoming Winslet, Kidman, now Williams.

And what actually happened to all those movies Williams had lined up??? Janis Joplin, The Challenger, This is Jane, Rio, etc. Only some months ago her IMDb had all of these listed......

I wasn’t really interested in this, but I am shallow and the actors look hot in this.

I hope so because they both have been in a bit of a downslide. Not to say that it’s been all bad for them, but as I am a broken record, I’ll say once again that back in the early to mid ‘10s, I was expecting a lot more by this time for them.

Just from these images, it looks much better than most of the stuff they have been in lately imo, so that’s a big plus. 

That lead actress replacement

Looks good. I really need to watch the Bergman classic (do people recommend the full miniseries or the film more?) - will make sure to before this comes out.

Excited to see Chastain finally break away from the no-nonsense, stone-cold roles that had really started to wear thin over time. 

The full trailer :

"I'm going to go out of my mind if I don't leave right now."

Chastain's line readings always get me right where it hurts.   Can't wait for this. 

Watched the first episode. Nothing really new here in terms of story, but it's still highly engaging and gorgeously produced. Chastain puts in her cleanest, most emotionally direct work in recent memory. Isaac is solid as well.

Ep1-2. Mintly made and a phenomenal acting showcase so far for Isaac and Chastain. Big year for those two former classmates.

We're only 2 episodes in, but I'm enjoying it. It hews pretty closely to Bergman's winning formula and having Isaac and Chastain play these parts (in a nicely executed gender swap of the original roles) makes for a compelling watch. Ingmar Bergman is, to me, maybe the finest screenwriter ever in terms of really plunging the emotional and spiritual depths of his characters so Hagai Levi and Amy Herzog were almost inevitably going to fall a little short of matching but I think their writing is still really strong and effectively modernizes the story.

Two things holding it back a bit for me are some weird bits of direction from Levi. The first, having each episode open with us seeing the actors prepping for the scene, is supposedly by Levi's words meant to break down the artificiality of the piece in order to make it apparent that this story is supposed to be more universal than this particular couple but instead it has the complete opposite effect. It's distancing, immediately taking the audience out of a narrative we are more than willing to give ourselves to given these actors are so damn captivating that a fucking red carpet moment became a trending topic. Also, it will (hopefully) date the project with the crew wearing masks for the pandemic.

The other issue I have with the direction is its use of shallow focus. I know shallow focus has become more and more of a trend in cinematography, but it still needs to be motivated. So many times the framing has two subjects (Isaac and Chastain naturally) at different depths and either only keeps focus on one or racks focus for whoever is speaking. You've already done half the work of setting the frame to show both of them, why not have the aperture wider (and the lights brighter to compensate for the change in exposure) so we can see both of them? It's not something that only happens a few notable times, it's apparent all throughout. The only rhyme or reason I can come up with is maybe the focus is meant to show how they are each in their own worlds and not truly seeing the bigger picture? Which feels like a half-assed excuse to go along with what has become more of a trend rather than a motivated and artfully done use of focus. This may feel like a nitpick, but considering how much this show relies on the strength of its actors working the tensions between them in a scene, having one of them be out of focus for half their shared shots severely undercuts that tension and feels like a piece of overdirection ("oh, Jessica is talking now so the audience only needs to see her, fuck Oscar acting his ass off"). Why have a two shot if you're not going to use it as a two shot?