Margot At The Wedding

Rating R Formats DVD Genre drama Starring Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Black, Zane Pais Directed by Noah Baumbach Publisher Paramount External Links Official Margot At The Wedding Website

No one can embarrass us, hurt us, or expose our flaws quite like family. As straightforward as its title, Margot At The Wedding modestly sets out to prove this common premise and succeeds, albeit with little fanfare.

Margot At The Wedding delivers sisterly estrangement in the convincing pair of Margot (Nicole Kidman) and Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who are finally reuniting after years of not speaking. The stage is set as hypercritical, standoffish writer Margot and her androgynous pre-teen son Claude (Zane Pais) return to the family home for the pending nuptials of unlucky-in-love-and-life divorcee Pauline. Lending comic relief-as well as pathos-to the story is Pauline's very new fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black), an unemployed, co-dependent artist with a short fuse.

Through Margot and Pauline's banter-polite and guarded at first, then progressively more heckling and manipulative-their sibling dynamic, idiosyncrasies, and smoldering grudges are laid bare. Margot's negative, judgmental presence stirs up tension, defensiveness, and even neighborly discord in Pauline and Malcolm's cozy but fragile home, eventually revealing the rifts in her own marriage, mental outlook, and worldview.

While Jason Leigh is surely pitiable and pathetic as the unglamorous, amenable sister seeking comfort in "Mr. Right Now", Kidman steals the show as the haughty, fickle prima donna who throws Pauline's thin hopes into stark relief. A snarky, manipulative elitist, Margot consistently berates and guilt-trips her family to mask her incredible insecurity and fears of abandonment. Her sudden whims and snippets of verbal cruelty reveal a lingering instability, suffered most by sensitive, perceptive Claude—who is alternately babied and rejected by his mercurial mother. Pais effortlessly conveys the precociousness, naïveté, and trustfulness that make Claude the one sympathetic character in the film. Because we get the definite feeling that, although Margot certainly thrives on schadenfreude, the people around her are contributing in one way or another to their own misery.

After the stunning writing, character development, and thematic brilliance of Noah Baumbach's last picture, The Squid And The Whale, Margot At The Wedding is a quiet disappointment. Admittedly, the ensemble acting is solid and the dysfunctional family dialogue is as honest as it is clever. But after a while, there's only so much witty banter, cutting insults, and dredged-up familial wounds to show.

Although there are echoes of Baumbach's former film--the petty disdain of the academic set, the latent insecurity beneath quirky and intelligent personalities, children innocently absorbing their parents' hang-ups--Margot doesn't quite gel. The story falls apart and degenerates into random moments of tragicomic silliness such as Black collapsing into tears, a symbolic tree crash, and an oddly confessional book signing.

As such, Margot At The Wedding can be summed up quite simply as the "feel-bad wedding movie" of the year. The raw material and potential for compelling narrative is there, but when the end comes (as random as any other scene), it falls incredibly flat.