Margot at the Wedding

"I have the emotional version of whatever bad Feng Shui would be."

Screened at the 2007 Telluride Film Festival

The Squid and the Whale, for all its strangeness and unpleasantness, seemed to at least have some affection for its characters — the movie wished them well, and so there was a reason for us to care. Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to that surprise arthouse hit, is just as peculiar, but infinitely less charitable. In fact, it’s rather hideously misanthropic, and without much to redeem the people who populate it. Without an entry point into the film — which is cynical and self-conscious, albeit sometimes quite funny — I found myself floundering. Baumbach may gain more indie cred with this, but I think he’s lost his way.

The film chronicles a family reunion of sorts: Margot (Nicole Kidman), successful author and devoted Manhattanite, and her son Claude (Zane Pais) return to the former’s childhood home, where her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is about to wed a ridiculous deadbeat “artist” (Jack Black); just why is unclear. Margot is considering leaving Claude’s father (John Turturro) for a sleazy fellow writer (Ciaran Hinds) but has not yet told her son. She and Pauline have not been speaking — there was some unpleasantness — but Margot’s decision to attend the wedding is supposedly a way of burying the hatchet.

Baumbach conceives of the family dynamic as a ceaseless competition, both literal (the sisters have a swimming contest and argue about which of them fucked more men in her heyday ["Wanna count?"]) and in the more abstract sense of giving oneself a boost by beating others down — there’s a lot of nasty, meaningless one-upmanship (“My mom says your mom is pregnant”; “My mom says your mom is unreliable”), passive-aggressiveness, and good old insecurity (“I used to date your mother, did you know that?). These characters are brutal to each other — the only time Margot compliments her sister is when insulting her choice of husband, and she seems to love her sincere, confused son only as someone to criticize (though she’ll defend him from others’ criticism; he’s hers, you see). Jack Black’s Malcolm is a detestable buffoon, there mostly for schticky comic relief, but also perhaps to suggest that Pauline really is marrying him as a desperate self-esteem boost, and maybe to get an edge on her more successful but maritally troubled sister. Lovely.

Baumbach clearly doesn’t like these people either, and it’s hard to blame him for that, but he doesn’t do much to make them real — he works hard to create an angular, off-kilter feel that will surely be heralded by acolytes of this brand of “indie” daring, but it just seemed forced to me. In fact, Baumbach’s offbeat-at-any-cost philosophy ruins the only possible human connection here — Margot’s son Claude, our instinctive sympathy for whom is wasted by the awkwardly quirky way his character is drawn: what kind of teenage boy tries to connect with his mother by declaring that he “masturbated yesterday”? Really, Noah? And it’s not clear why Baumbach had to androgynize him to the point where I spent almost half an hour convinced that he was a she — a way to accentuate his misfit status, I suppose, but it’s a stunt that needlessly muddies the waters of a character that should have been the audience’s salvation.

Baumbach does get off some good comic bits here — the abortive kick down the stairs is priceless; good job JJL — and the movie is superficially engaging enough, but these people are so intensely unlikable, and the film so unwilling to help them toward any sort of redemption, that Margot becomes a sour and unrewarding experience. Movie characters don’t have to be pleasant, but in this case there isn’t even so much as a point of interest.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2007
Starring:	Zane Pais, Jack Black, Jennifer Jason Leigh, John Turturro, Ciaran Hinds, Nicole Kidman
Directed by:	Noah Baumbach
Rated:	R