Adam Driver wears a Rolex Oyster Perpetual

Adam Driver is paid to wear Breitling. He is one of the faces of the brand's Cinema Squad, alongside Brad Pitt and Charlize Theron, and on the press tour for Marriage Story he wore a big Breitling on his wrist. In the movie itself, he wore a Rolex. Not a prop Rolex. His own.

Marriage Story (2019) is Noah Baumbach's film about a divorce, which is to say it is a film about division. Charlie Barber, a New York theater director played by Driver, and his wife Nicole, played by Scarlett Johansson, set out to end things kindly and wind up with lawyers, Laura Dern and Alan Alda and Ray Liotta, carving their life into halves: who keeps the money, and which coast their young son grows up on. Almost everything Charlie has is up for negotiation. The watch is not. It is a Rolex Oyster Perpetual 39, reference 114300, a steel watch with a sunray blue dial and lacquered green numerals. He wears it in nearly every scene, and the film never once mentions it.

There is a scene where the watch does its quiet work. The divorce has turned, and Charlie is on the phone in a theater stairwell, getting taken apart by Nicole's lawyer while his own play rehearses on the stage below. He fidgets with a box cutter to keep his hands busy. The camera tightens on those hands, and there is the blue Rolex, the one thing in the frame that is entirely, uncomplicatedly his. A man whose whole life is being split in two, wearing the watch nobody gets to divide.