Margot at the Wedding

I assume you are normal. Whatever that is. Would you ever stop to question that?

Margot is a fish out of water. She would be 'normal' back home. Her pond is Manhattan. Intellectuals. 'Nice' people. Successful. Words of several syllables that easily slip into popular psychobabble - but in an acceptable sort of way. Social affirmation obscures our faults. The world after all is as we, and our friends, understand it to be. A self-selecting reality.

For Margot's sister Pauline, the self-selecting, self-affirming, 'normality' is different. She lives in the countryside. Fulfilment would be a down-to-earth lifestyle with someone who thinks she's great. That man in her life, played by Jack Black, is a very ordinary sort. He doesn't even have a proper job. But they seem content. They will marry under the family tree. In the garden.

As two worlds collide, flaws that could have been overlooked come nastily to the surface. Margot can only return Pauline's sisterly love in a cold, cerebral way. She becomes easy to dislike. We soon doubt her sincerity. Pauline looks more and more pathetic against her accomplished sibling. She becomes easy to feel sorry for. Blood is thicker than water. But it exerts unbearable strain.

In best scenarios, romantic comedies and feelgood movies, love always triumphs over dysfunctionality. If only life was so reliable. With the uplifting coup of family bonds in such films as Little Miss Sunshine or The Darjeeling Ltd. Those movies provided us with reassuring escapism. And I admit they were more satisfying than the rather bleak Margot at the Wedding. But it is this film that gives such niggling pause for thought.

It is easy for box office comedy to turn on family difference that ultimately heals. But it is the less than fairytale endings that we have to deal with in real life. Not funny. Maybe just a bit painful. Like estranged family. Hurts that don't heal in a neat two hours of celluloid.

Margot at the Wedding is not a great movie. Nor a comfortable one. It looks at the fragility of one's persona - or definition of normality - that we use to interact with society. With society's forgiving and less forgiving parts. Parts that are perhaps within our own families. But it does encourage you to think. And there are too few movies out just now that do that.

Baumbach's 'Margot At The Wedding', in the centre, tells the story of a writer who reunites with her sister at her 'wedding'. Margot is a neurotic borderliner who would go around picking flaws at and diagnosing other people to avoid her own issues. She is so afraid of loss that she keeps her son dependent on her but at the same time she keeps everyone at a distance. Her sister Pauline, also a borderliner, is pretty much an extension of her EXCEPT that she tries to stay optimistic and is trying to heal and dealing with her own issues. Their awkward reunion creates a clash of their personalities, reveals clues of some disturbing family history and results in chaos.

Baumbach's execution is raw and simplistic. The minimal use of music, slightly washed out colours, unpolished visuals and hand-held camera-work allows the audience to be involved in the characters' lives as voyeurs. Either the viewer is peeking into the private moments of the sisters or he/she is there as a silent observer. Baumbach's writing is terrific. Even though the dialogues are of few words, they speak volumes and go back to years of experience. The characters are superbly written. Even though you resent them at some point or even laugh at them, you care about them throughout. In the dialogues between the sisters, Baumbach hints some dark underlying themes such as incest, rape, abuse, over-dependence, dysfunctional relationships and abandonment. He does not fully explore them but cleverly suggests them allowing the viewer to ponder. There are also plenty of subtle themes that are introduced.

Nicole Kidman, once again, delivers an excellent performance. She proves that she can handle any complex role and this is why she is among the best. Jennifer Jason Leigh is equally stupendous as Pauline. Watching Margot and Pauline really felt like watching two real sisters who have had a chaotic unsettling family history. Both Kidman and Jason Leigh display raw emotions that move the viewer. Jack Black too is great as Malcolm. Zane Pais and Flora Cross are good and John Torturro is brilliant.

'Margot At The Wedding' is one of the darkest comedies that centre around a dysfunctional family. It's disturbing but also funny and keeps you pondering. It might not appeal to all but there are some of us who can appreciate this kind of movie.

This little family drama starts when estranged siblings come together for a wedding.

It's Jennifer Jason Leigh's wedding, but the movie centers on her narcissistic sister Nicole Kidman, who spends the movie quietly and skillfully tearing down everyone around her, including her own child, and the trying to undo the damage with a half-hearted compliment. She is an interesting character who knows she's often cruel and uncaring but simply blames other people for making her realize it.

Not much happens in the film, which is all about small moments and Kidman's small-scale destruction. The most interesting moments are those in which Kidman confronts her limitations and flaws, as in the tree- climbing scene or the interview. Jack Black is also effective as the schlub JJL is marrying.

I love JJL, but she feels a little overshadowed here. That's understandable, as she plays a relatively normal character.

While there were good scenes, the movie never grabbed me, and the ending left me simply wondering why Baumbach had bothered to make this. It all feels so ultimately pointless.

"Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules." F. Scott Fitzgerald

Margot at the Wedding is the heavier side of its director Noah Baumbach's Squid and the Whale and just a bit weightier than Little Miss Sunshine. Nowhere is it near the lightness of The Royal Tenenbaums, but the dysfunctional family motif hovers always close to the risible. Margot is a feast of acting seasoned with sides of family lunacy close enough to the seeming sanity of most our families.

Margot (Nichole Kidman) and her son, Claude (Zane Pais), visit her estranged sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), for Pauline's' impending marriage to immature, lovable slacker Malcolm (Jack Black). Margot, thinking Malcolm isn't worthy of Pauline, is not secret about her dislike ("He's not ugly. He's completely unattractive"). But then short-story writer Margot has never been reticent about family matters, as writing about them caused the rift with her sister many years ago.

If this story echoes Eric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach, it is probably not a coincidence, both in title and accent on dialogue, but in no way does even Rohmer approach Baumbach's trenchant criticism of contemporary family relationships, including the tricky one between eccentric son and neurotic mom.

If for no other reason, see this family dysfunction drama to enjoy feeling superior to the downright mine field each of the characters faces daily in a family that turns back on itself in forgiveness as frequently as Britney Spears loses her kids and gains them back again. Mix in a little Freudian psychoanalysis ("What was it about Dad that had us f------ so many guys?") and East-coast sunless scenes, and you'll wish for your Thanksgiving back so you could newly appreciate its relatively low-level social WMD's and surprising humor.

Like the grainy film stock and low-key lighting, Nicole Kidman's Margot brings gloom despite her daunting beauty and witty tongue. Oh, well, that's my kind of lady, and that's my tumultuous family, ready for a Christmas turkey that should be more delectable this time around thanks to Noah Baumbach.

Baumbach was nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay for his amusing, spot-on study of a New York literary intellectual family in crisis, 'The Squid and the Whale.' As befits one who received accolades and some little box office success, he has moved forward with similar themes and a better budget, and was able to enlist not only several more well-known actors but a famous cinematographer, Harris Savides, and a renowned costume designer, Ann Roth. Baumbach has also moved along in time, as it were. If 'The Squid and the Whale' was a parental breakup mostly considered from the viewpoint of a teenage boy, this family analysis has more of an adult sibling focus--though there's a boy on hand who's important. More limited in its time-span than 'Squid,' 'Margot' is more complex in its specifics and in its conversational delineation of neurotics at play. Just about every scene is a relationship meltdown. It's a wonder nobody comes to violence. In fact one character does get kicked in the chest, and a big tree falls down, doing some damage.

Baumbach himself may understand what all this is about, but the choppily edited and shot piece has too little dramatic structure (despite being very much like a play) to go anywhere or make much overall sense. Despite good buzz from some quarters and urban (especially New York) fans, the young director may lose with 'Margot' a sizable slice of the credibility he gained with 'Squid.'

Pauline (Baumbach's wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh), who lives on the family house on an island, is about to be married, for the second time, to out of work artist Malcolm (Jack Black). Her sister Margot (Nicole Kidman) comes with her young adolescent son Claude (Zane Pais). Ingrid (Flora Cross), Pauline's daughter, is there, and a playmate for Claude. Margot is a well-known short-story writer, and it turns out she's scheduled for a reading at a local bookstore with a former flame, Dick (Ciaran Hinds), whom she seems to want to get together with again. Dick's sexy daughter Maisy (Halley Feiffer) is also on hand. Margot has told her husband Jim (John Turturro) not come for the wedding (though briefly he does appear).

Pauline and Margot haven't been getting on well for years, but they both approach this occasion with the misguided assumption that they're nonetheless still each other's best friends and that things are going to be rich and consoling.

But as soon as the good-looking and accomplished, if thoroughly neurotic Margot lays eyes on the fat layabout Malcolm, she goes to work on Pauline to cancel the wedding--even though Pauline reveals she's pregnant. There is a family of nasty neighbors, the Voglers, who want the big tree in the backyard to come down. Its roots are spreading to their property, it's rotting, and it's poisoning their plants, they say.

Margot wants Claude to become more independent, but neither of them is ready for that yet. Nobody seems to be ready for anything, relationship-wise. This is about the only thing that clearly emerges.

One of the problems is in the conception of the main characters. This is not the anguished, edgy Leigh we've often seen in the past but a mellow woman, and despite lack of accomplishment and temper tantrums (which he credibly argues are justified in this crazy situation) Malcolm may have been a sweet guy who clicks very well with Pauline. Margot seems to make trouble for everybody, beginning wit her son. But since she's the most accomplished family member, it's a bit hard to know how to take her. It's a bit hard to know how to take anybody. Complex characters are fine, but nobody in this piece is going in a consistent direction. And this is equally true of the action. Was the wedding meant to have a meltdown before it ever happened?

This is a slice of life in more ways than one. Scenes are constantly cut off and linked to the next by jump cuts, an effect meant to be vérité and sophisticated that tends at times merely to look sloppy. Though Baumbach says he got exactly the look he wanted, it's surprising that the Savides of 'Elephant' and 'Zodiac' would give us so many shots that are seriously under-lit. Again, the effect hovers between original and amateurish.

All this is a shame, because all the actors do great work. The young newcomer who plays Margot's son Claude, Zane Pais, is indeed miraculously natural and believable. Leigh and Kidman do some of their best work, and Jack Black has perfect pitch in every line. There's no doubt that weeks of careful rehearsals on the set, in the house, helped the cast work so well together, and Baumbach knew what he wanted. But it reads as a series of vignettes rather than a film.