While Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain Shine, Scenes from a Marriage Doesn’t Warrant a Remake

Relationships and all of their messiness is an inherently interesting topic. It’s why we read tabloids or gossip about drama in our personal lives. Exploring relationships and the way that humans interact with one another intimately is one of my favorite settings for fiction, and I’ll admit that I’m more interested in messy, humanistic dramas that have the potential to make me cry than most people. So it’s no surprise that I was extremely intrigued by the plot of HBO’s new miniseries Scenes from a Marriage.

The 5-episode series is based on a ‘70s Swedish drama of the same name, and follows an almost identical plot to that of the original. When confronted by a huge life decision, a couple (played here by Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain) must evaluate how their own individual needs affect the status of their partnership over time. The slow, heavy burn of the dissolution of a marriage draws comparisons to more recent relationship dramas like Marriage Story and Blue Valentine as two-handers that focus on small details of lives unraveling, and Scenes from a Marriage matches that somber tone.

Mira (Chastain) and Jonathan (Isaac) open the series in an at-home interview about their relationship with a local psychology graduate student interested in the ways that gender roles influence success in a marriage—a scene that mirrors the earlier version. Right away their answers seem dodgy and uncertain and overly academic, and are accompanied by facial expressions that reveal much more than their words. It’s no surprise that the marriage falls apart shortly thereafter, but without seeing the solid foundation that it was built on, it’s hard as an audience to feel as invested in the demise.

The original Swedish iteration was helmed by Ingmar Bergman and focused on a white, heterosexual couple navigating conversations that weren’t typically dissected to such a degree on national television. It was revolutionary in its own right for the time, showcasing a marriage with a female primary breadwinner and candid dialogue about happiness and love.

You’d think, then, that the 2021 version would update the premise to reflect the more diverse world we live in and the various types of romantic relationships that one can engage in, but instead writer and director Hagai Levi chooses to lean into the exact same story without even revising many of the beats. There are conversations about kids, affairs, and money that color the central relationship, but none of it feels particularly special or unique enough to warrant a remake. To tie the central themes back to external factors like job disparities, religion or—worst of all—capitalism makes it feel rigid and unsympathetic. It’s the minutiae of relationships that make them such great fodder for television, and the successful ones mine unspoken moments for hesitations. We barely see that play out within Scenes from a Marriage.