Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Scenes From A Marriage’ On HBO, Where Jessica Chastain And Oscar Isaac Remake Ingmar Bergman’s 1970s Miniseries

Ingmar Bergman was never known for doing movies and TV that would be considered uplifting. His 1973 television series Scenes From A Marriage starts with a long-term married couple who were not on the same page and just went south from there, with infidelity and sexual exploration being the biggest things that destroy the show’s central relationship. A new version of that series has been made, with Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac playing the troubled couple. Have things about marriage changed in the intervening half century?

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: From the back we see Jessica Chastain walking through a door and onto a noisy soundstage, with a masked crew making sure she gets to her spot. She sits down in the powder room set where her character’s first scene takes place.

The Gist: Mira Levy (Chastain) has just gotten some interesting news as she walks out of the powder room, and makes sure her daughter Ava (Lily Lane) is occupied before joining her husband Jonathan (Oscar Isaac) in the other room to be interviewed by a grad student named Danielle (Sunita Mani). She’s studying couples who go against gender norms. Mira is a tech executive and the breadwinner in the family; Jonathan is a philosophy professor, and he takes care of Ava most of the time.

The interview with Danielle shows the current awkwardness between them, how he talks over her and how she has lost her assertiveness. But Danielle feels that, since they’ve been married over 10 years, they’re a “successful” couple. When Jonathan goes out to start a new video for their daughter, Mira becomes even more awkward. The conversation then turns to their thoughts about monogamy.

We transition to a dinner the Levys have with their friends Kate (Nicole Beharie) and Peter (Corey Stoll). The seemingly happy couple soon get into a vicious fight over their polyamorous arrangement, mainly as a result of Peter’s cheating. Kate has just broken up a man she had feelings for and Peter’s completely jealous that she actually had an outside relationship. It gets to the point where Kate storms upstairs with Mira following. Kate’s notion of what a successful relationship is throws Mira for a loop, as does the kiss Kate gives her.

Later that night, Mira reveals that she’s pregnant. Jonathan seems surprised, but pleasantly so. Apparently, she had missed a few days of birth control over a vacation and that’s what did it. But the two of them hash out whether they should go through with the pregnancy or not. It was hard with Ava at first but as she’s matured things have gotten better, but it seems that both of them had checked out at some point. They seem to finally come to an agreement, and we see the two of them at a doctor’s office in the next scene.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Scenes From A Marriage is adapted from Ingmar Bergman 1973 series, which starred Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson. But in a modern context, the topic of how modern marriages fall apart has shades of scripted fare like Us and State Of The Union and unscripted series like Couples Therapy.

Our Take: Despite scenes with heavy hitting actors like Stoll and Beharie, Chastain and Isaac carry the bulk of the dramatic load in Scenes From A Marriage. Adapted and directed by Hagai Levi (he also wrote the series with Amy Herzog), it tries to update the Bergman series by showing what brings marriages down in the context of the 2020s. But a perusal of the episodic summaries of the original series shows that close to a half century later, the changes are mostly around the edges.

Then, as now, marriages fail for the same reasons: Infidelity, people growing apart, people having different expectations of what they want from a marriage, lack of communication, abuse. Some relationships, like Kate and Peter’s, are different than what we might have seen in the ’70s, but the problems still involve a difference in expectations.

Chastain and Isaac convey this disconnect brilliantly. Chastain is especially effective in her first-episode performance, where she’s tentative around the seemingly-more-assertive Jonathan, despite her influential and high-earning job. When she gets sad about being pregnant, Chastain’s confused and depressed tears feel genuine.

Isaac gives Jonathan the proper amount of arrogance mixed with low self-esteem, which wasn’t helped by his cloistered Modern Orthodox Jewish upbringing. He bowls over Mira without even realizing it; he likely feels everything is fine while she feels that she has absolutely no voice in their relationship.

What we wonder is if the dreary subject matter can be propped up by the two stars over its 5 episodes. All of the topics we mentioned above, the ones that kill marriages, will likely be explored, whether it’s in the context of the Levys’ marriage or how they react to others’ relationship problems. As wonderful as their performances are, we can’t imagine watching five hours of this marriage slowly falling apart, and then seeing the two of them exploring just what they want out of their relationship.

Sex and Skin: Besides talk of infidelity, there is none of either.

Parting Shot: In the doctor’s office, Mira asks Jonathan if she can be alone. We pan back from the table where she’s sitting, and her emotions belie what she felt going into the appointment.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Corey Stoll, because, even in his brief scenes in the first episode, he shows just how good he is at playing the seemingly normal guy who becomes an aggressive, angry, creepy asshole in a heartbeat.

Most Pilot-y Line: Trying to figure out why we watched Chastain walking to the set of her first scene as the show’s cold open. Maybe a nod to Bergman?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Scenes From A Marriage works simply because of Chastain and Isaac. Can we put up with the depressing story just to see their performances? The jury is still out on that.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Scenes From A Marriage On HBO Max