Following the critical success of the semi-autobiographical The Squid and the Whale (2005), writer/director Noah Baumbach furthers his decade-long tour of upper-middle-class dysfunction in Margot at the Wedding.
Filtered through the muted colors and natural lighting of cinematographer Harris Savides, Baumbach’s fifth feature is a comedy of cruelty and humiliation centering on the subtle savagery of siblings.
This time around, the Baumbach family unit is transplanted to Long Island, where the aloof and impressionable Pauline (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) is getting married to Malcolm (Jack Black), a crude, depressive slacker/musician/painter. Margot (Nicole Kidman), a successful Manhattan-based writer, packs up with her androgynous son, Claude (Zane Pais), and pays an unexpected visit to her estranged sister’s wedding despite not having spoken in years.
Though Pauline blames one of her sister’s autobiographical stories as the cause of her first divorce, Margot is welcomed back to the run-down family house with open arms.
Margot’s reliance on autobiographical material puts her talents as a writer into question, but she is capable of using words as an emotionally destructive weapon. Margot has a particularly sly and cruel way of speaking and behaving, and her presence almost immediately creates a tumultuous atmosphere of petty manipulations, not-so-well-kept secrets, paranoid gossip, and vicious insights from which no one is safe (she even gets into it with the strange redneck neighbors).
Though Margot excels at exposing the secrets of others, she’s not without her own. The true motivation of her visit shortly comes to the fore — leaving behind her husband Jim (a surprisingly handsome John Turturro) in Manhattan, the wedding coincides with a book reading she’s doing with her former lover and collaborator Dick (Ciaran Hinds).
To go along with her high social standing, Margot exhibits the most narcissistic and shallow of behaviors in the film. But she’s not without a complex duality — for all the intellectual mind games and morally corrupt behavior, she turns out to be the film’s saddest, most convoluted, and intriguing character. She leaves her disintegrating marriage in Manhattan to find herself even more uncomfortable in the home she grew up in (she can’t even masturbate without giving up in a fit of sexual frustration).
Written, acted, and directed with remarkable nuance, the film whimpers and screams the whole way through its lean 93-minute running time. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more unsympathetic protagonist than Margot in theaters this fall, but Baumbach uses this powerful and pitiable character as insight to the reasons and ways people (especially family) can treat each other.
– Eric Marsh
Margot at the Wedding
Director: Noah Baumbach
93 minutes, Paramount Vantage
US release date: November 16, 2007
Margot at the Wedding: www.margotatthewedding.com
Paramount Vantage: www.paramountvantage.com