Noah Baumbach emerges yet again with a dose of sad reality – Margot at the Wedding, which is not a long stretch from his 2005 film The Squid and the Whale. A once-novice critic of the American family, Baumbach now raises his own standards with this striking unformulaic mosaic of your troubled, yet humorous American family. All the way down to the setting (is it somewhere on or off Long Island?), the film embraces a certain narrative ambiguity that directly mirrors and compliments the complex emotional ambiguities that play out in this critique of modern family ties. However, it is precisely this ambiguity, both of location and of the different relationships staged in the film, that offers a simultaneous mystery and familiarity to the genuine workings of any familial relationship, be it sister-sister, between cousins, or sister-and-brother-in-law.
Margot (Nicole Kidman), a New York fiction writer, heads back with her son Claude (Zane Pais) to the oceanfront home of her childhood (location unknown) to attend her sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh), (second) wedding to deadbeat artist Malcolm (Jack Black). However, Margot’s ticks reveal themselves, as she expected, upon this shifty family reunion—and the only way to maintain sanity, is by refilling the wine glass and keeping the joint sparked. Immediately Pauline, the lax Bohemian housewife, begins justifying her odd, and even nonsensical relationship with an overweight narcissistic musician, to her disapproving sister. And in the heavy silences, mixed with musty lighting in the old rooms of this tormented house, lie the entangled disparities that grace a problematic relationship between sisters.
A Bright Narrative, Thanks to a Dead Tree
The film covers a few days, as the adults unravel and expose their pathetic downfalls, to the hyper-aware adolescents (i.e. Margot’s son Claude, Pauline’s daughter from her first marriage, and a problematic teenage babysitter), all in the midst of preparing for the meager and idiotic wedding that is supposed to take place. Of course, things go wrong: the oak tree under which Pauline and Malcolm would like to join together, the same oak tree that has stood on their front lawn since the girls’ childhood, is dead. The half-breed neighbors are demanding that the tree be removed, as its roots are killing the life on their property. And in this way, Baumbach so intricately allows for the mise-en-scene to intermingle and become one with the very characters who inhabit the house, the land, and the ideology of the film. The viewer is forced to ask, “Is the tree really dead?” “Are these relationships dead?” “Do I love these characters, or are they just too pathetic?”
What ensues is an unconventional and realistic story about a family whose tumultuous past inhabits and shapes their rocky present. It is a film that poses one discrepancy, by way of aesthetics, dialogue, and narrative, and then with a purposeful aloofness moves to yet another shifty encounter. However, it’s Margot’s holes and darkness, that allows for the characters’ bright and feverish interiorities to rise and expose a certain hopeful humor in the darkness of their parallel fates.
Margot Slaps Cheaper By the Dozen in the Face
What makes Baumbach’s portrayal of a family coming to terms (or not) with each other’s differences and life choices so refreshing, is the way the characters’ criticisms of each other (i.e. Margot’s criticisms of Pauline, or Margot’s criticisms of her innocent son), are mere projections of their own insecurities. While so far, it may seem that the film’s thematic darkness eludes appreciation, the actors refresh the screenplay, along with exceptional camera person Harris Savides (Zodiac, American Gangster), who’s hand-held camera work and preference for natural lighting gives this movie a stale-yet-old-beach-house look.
Stellar Jack Black wholly embodies the pathetic nature of his character, as a man who is financially and emotionally nurtured by a woman far exceeding (well, not so much) his standards, and yet still musters up the audacity to cheat on her with a preteen. Nicole Kidman really internalizes her troubled loving-yet-emotionally-distant Margot; Kidman’s exceptional beauty is remarkably dulled down by her character’s poisoned and jaded personality. In this way, she and Baumbach reassess the Hollywood convention of beauty, and more or less, spit on it. And serving as the most enigmatic character of the film, Jennifer Jason Leigh glows, as she portrays Pauline’s down-to-earth and even grotesque mannerisms, as well as her overarching self-doubts, in the most heart-warming way possible. The viewer ends up loving these characters for their mean streaks, their strange ticks, and their commonly pathetic nature.
What makes Margot at the Wedding so refreshing with these dysfunctional blurbs of reality that universally grace modern relationships (whether we want to admit this or not), is that the common viewer can find humor in these pathetic nuances. What you may end up asking yourself by the end of the film is, “Hm, if Nicole Kidman is that pathetic, am I that pathetic too?” Margot at the Wedding slaps Cheaper by the Dozen in the face, and then shoots it in the foot. The perfect middle class family doesn’t exist, and conveyed even more so by Margot, is that the imperfections and tribulations that inevitably leech onto the ‘family’, are what expose the real beauty in being human. Baumbach’s underbelly of the familial experience may not be as palatable as your Blockbuster PG portrayal; however, it sure as hell resonates on a far more sophisticated level of realism that so seldom graces the screens today. Available on DVD.
Jessica Lipman - I am a freelance writer with a specialty in film and literary criticism, as well as general academic writing. I've written extensively on ...
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