Marriage Story, Noah Baumbach’s drama starring Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver as a divorcing couple engaged in a raging custody battle, won universal acclaim from critics and numerous awards, including six Oscar nominations and one win, for Laura Dern’s barnstorming attorney.
But perhaps the highest honour has just been revealed by the Wall Street Journal, which reports that audio of the central couple screaming at one another has been judged so upsetting it is now being used to deter wolves from attacking livestock.
“I need the wolves to respond and know that, hey, humans are bad,” a US Department of Agriculture district supervisor in Oregon told the WSJ. His teams employ “drone cowhands, whose quadcopters have thermal cameras that can reveal any wolf lurking in the darkness”. The predator is then spotlit and treated to audio blasted over a loudspeaker. Aside from Baumbach-scripted acid insults, tracks include fireworks, gunshots and AC/DC’s Thunderstruck.
The practice is know as “wolf hazing” and is employed rather than culling as grey wolves are on the federal government’s list of endangered species.
Happily, Driver and Johansson’s Academy Award-nominated performances have proved just as impactful for canines as humans.
“Drones were deployed in the Klamath Basin of southern Oregon after 11 cows were killed by wolves there in a 20-day period,” reports the WSJ. “Over the next 85 days, when drones were on patrol, only two were killed.”
Other emotionally volatile high-points in the 2019 film include Driver’s feeling rendition of Steven Sondheim’s Being Alive and Dern’s caustic broadside about the double standards by which mothers and fathers are judged (which found an echo in America Ferrera’s speech in the 2023 film Barbie, which was also co-written by Baumbach). It is not believed either of these moments are also being broadcast to pests.
Marriage Story premiered at the Venice film festival in 2019 and was named on many critics’ best of the year lists, coming second on the Guardian’s year-end roundup.
In his five star review of the film, Peter Bradshaw singled out the “central rage-filled confrontation” for praise. “This does feel theatrical,” he wrote, “but in such a lucid and intelligent way.”
