HBO’s ‘Scenes from a Marriage’ Is An Acting Masterclass

The tell is in the title. Hagai Levi’s remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage is quite literally that: scenes. The bookending episodes of this five-part miniseries for HBO stitch together an assortment of places and people, the meat of the show consists of little more than Oscar Isaac’s Jonathan and Jessica Chastain’s Mira working through the sensual, scintillating complexities of their relationship. The show’s strongest passage, episodes two through four, simply let them play out a single conflict with pure naturalism – unhurried by the need to compress emotional beats into a tight narrative timeline.

There are moments when Scenes from a Marriage feels a bit like an academic exercise for an advanced acting seminar. It really does boil down to two people, alone in a space, having to demonstrate their mastery of character motivation. At a certain point, what exactly Jonathan and Mira are litigating through their bile-filled bickering fades into the background. It’s how they make it feel so effortless and lived-in that provides the show’s main attraction – and Levi seems to realize this as shown by the show’s fourth-wall-breaking cold opens which dissolve the distinction between character and actor.

As constructed as the conceit may feel, it’s not a training ground for the duo traipsing on this playground of performativity. Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain are true devotees to the technical side of their craft, and their training pays enormous dividends in Scenes from a Marriage. The two were contemporaries and chums at Juilliard’s prestigious acting school, a shared history and skillset that adds a marvelous meta-dimensionality to the show. Their ability to pull from a common technical toolbox, plus two decades of off-screen friendship, allows them to align on subtext. Not since DiCaprio and Winslet in Revolutionary Road has an on-screen couple locked onto such a potent personal and professional frequency.

So often with these titanic pairings, the proceedings can devolve into an “act-off” of who can outdo the other. That’s not so with the magnanimity Isaac and Chastain provide for one another on-screen. The two are so studied in their technique that they can effectively disguise their meticulousness, methodical preparation as organic revelations. Though the show veers into shouting, seducing, and even swinging fists, the twosome remains remarkably in line with the pitch needed to escalate or calm a given scene. It’s a bit like cheating, but who would dare call foul when the final product of their collaboration is so stellar? Between this and 2014’s A Most Violent Year, audiences should never have to go more than seven years without a new Isaac-Chastain joint.

Most notably, the two even back down on the need to aggressively react to each other’s antics. Though Scenes from a Marriage does not hide its focus on the very nature of performance, either for the camera or for a partner, the characters themselves never betray any knowledge of any audience larger than the one before their eyes. The complex language of pitch and gesture undergirding Jonathan and Mira’s relationship is one hermetically sealed for their own knowledge only. It does not always make sense to the viewer, but this vernacular makes sense to them. That internal logic is all that ultimately matters to make the show work.

Scenes from a Marriage is never stagey, either, a remarkable feat given the constraints Levi places on his project. Both actors have done their fair share of theater and internalize the distinctions between the mediums. There’s a subtlety and intimacy to the performances, especially from Oscar Isaac, that would be impossible to communicate in the theater. While Levi’s filmmaking might lack the panache of something like Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, another single-location bound marital drama, it does have the good sense to capture the full contours of the starring turns.

There are few performers who could carry a project as sparse as Scenes from a Marriage sheerly on the strength of this procedural precision alone. None of the arguments around career, childcare, carnality, and compatibility are anything particularly new or different. But in lieu of flashy filmmaking, their simmering hostilities become the spectacle in their own right. Hagai Levi’s chosen format allows the actors the space to find the inflection points in the material with unhurried grace. He makes them earn the big moments; Isaac and Chastain always rise to the occasion by exploring their way to the conclusion rather than making it feel foregone.

While the arc feels a bit soapier than Bergman’s searing original, it ultimately matters little when there are two dynamite performances with a full runway to take flight. Both performers understand that these quarrels are just masking deeper-seated, unspoken issues. It’s a thrill to know that Isaac and Chastain both operate with the knowledge of these layers animating their behavior. The slow chipping away at each other’s facades will ultimately get at the animating question of the series: once two become one in a marriage, can they ever really untangle themselves?

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.

Watch Scenes From A Marriage on HBO Max