Review: "Margot at the Wedding"

Halfway through Margot at the Wedding, it's hard not to think about Noah Baumbach's thought process while formulating the story: "I made my dad look pretty awful in my first movie, the Oscar-nominated The Squid and the Whale, but my mom got off kind of easy. Let's see if we can fix that with some good ol' character assassination." Or, you know, something like that.

Like the character of Margot herself, the film is mean-spirited and has far less insight than it supposes. It begins on a train: Margot and her almost-androgynous son, Claude, make their way out of Manhattan and toward the coast for Margot's sister's wedding. It's immediately clear that Nicole Kidman relishes the role of the spiteful Margot, lacing every line, even the joyous ones, with undertones of bitter discontent and a deep-seated vulnerability. She makes something out of it, that's for sure, but when line after line is essentially an off-hand way of undercutting someone around her, it becomes a performance in search of a character or, rather, a character in search of an arc.

Among Margot's victims are her sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, looking truly like Kidman's kin), the secretly pregnant bride-to-be; Pauline reiterates that she's thankful for Margot's presence at the event but, of course, she'll grow to regret any gratitude she exhibited. Margot's selfish actions doom the nuptials the moment she steps back into her childhood home and spews forth "constructive" criticism. Pauline's fiance, Malcolm (Jack Black) is a lay-about who bounces between optimism, egotism, and harsh realism and never seems to settle anywhere except for miserable. Black is tonally on a whole different wavelength than the other actors, but at least he's going for something besides irritating. The kids, too, are a mystery: their performances are so extremely offbeat that I was waiting for the reveal that one or both of them had some kind of disability (Margot routinely and unironically accuses children and foreigners of being retarded or autistic; for her to overlook her own child's issues would have been fitting.)

As the wedding gets closer, Margot gets meaner and so does her sister. For ten beautiful minutes, John Turturro shows up as Margot's estranged husband and his gentle nature is like an acid that slices through the ridiculous fat of the angry clan. But Margot notes that his kindness makes her feel like a bad person so she sends him away. And as he leaves, so does our hope for any sensible changes in direction.

There's a scene in Margot, which takes place after she's done most of her damage, in which she's interviewed at a local bookstore. (The character is, of course, a successful short story writer; no surprise to anyone who saw Squid.) The host asks her if a short story about a father who psychologically torments his daughters is autobiographical. "My father was very loving," Margot replies. "No," says the host. "I meant, did you base the father on yourself?" It's perhaps the movie's one great scene--or half a scene; it devolves into a random rant on Puerto Ricans--and it's one that either shows great insight on Noah Baumbach's part or extreme lack of it. It's easy to see the auteur writing himself as Claude, the tortured son whose mommy issues will haunt him way beyond adolescence. But everytime Margot blames someone else for her problems, uses her wit to destroy other's lives, or assumes her hurtful actions are really serving to better everyone, one can't help but make the connection between Baumbach and Margot. Operating under the guise of an artful film about complex people, Margot is nothing more than an attack piece that's so high-minded it stops making sense.


Do I just not get Noah Baumbach? Am I missing something? Check out reviews that agree with me and ones that are just plain wrong:
Margot at the Wedding: 56% on Rotten Tomatoes.