I recently had the pleasure of watching the film Marriage Story staring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson. While many good movies move me to happiness or sadness or many other common emotion, I was surprised to note during this movie that I actually felt, in a way, uncomfortable. Not in because the subject of the film was in some way horrifying or unfamiliar, but for precisely the opposite reason. It was so normal. To me, the brilliance of the film, and especially its primary actors, was how it showed the characters as normal people (albeit with extraordinary talents in their fields) going through a normal event but with abnormal circumstances. I was struck by how the main characters were still actual friends outside the courtroom, but vicious to each other inside (driven on by their expensive lawyers). The discomfort for me came from how believable BOTH types of interactions were, as I have experienced my own similar dichotomy of love/hate in my life, but have never seen it portrayed so well in film. Indeed, the primary motivation behind all the vitriol was in fact love, the main characters’ love for their son and their desire for custody which was manipulated for gain by the lawyers. In short, the film brilliant to me not in how it portrays or humanizes the extraordinary, as some great films do, but how it shows how extraordinary the events that regular people go through truly are, for them.