Director Noah Baumbach (right) with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black
Jennifer Jason Leigh
Noah Baumbach with Jennifer Jason Leigh
MARGOT AT THE WEDDING A-
USA (92 mi) 2007
d: Noah Baumbach
Another blistering critique of family dysfunction, while The
Squid and the Whale (2005) featured a repugnant father (Jeff Daniels), this
film features one of the more revolting mothers in Nicole Kidman’s neurotically
smug Margot, an upscale New Yorker who perhaps best represents what years of
therapy gone wrong can do. Honest to the
point of being compulsive, where she can’t help herself from making snide,
overly critical remarks, she’s willing to destroy all those around her in the
name of truth and honesty, used like a bulldozer to clear the landscape around
her, where her primary purpose appears to be to deflect personal criticism away
from herself, completely oblivious to the ramifications of her actions. She’s brazenly horrible, where her overly
grumpy nature around others, exacerbated by the everpresent glasses of wine,
lead to despicable family betrayals which she reveals like open sores through
her successful short stories. Of primary
interest, due to her literary acclaim, she is actually considered the
breadwinner and the voice of reason and success in the family, even though she
hasn’t spoken to her more free-spirited sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh)
in years. They are burying the hatchet,
however, as Pauline announces she’s about to be married to the mildly artistic
but perennially unemployed musician, Malcolm (Jack Black), who Margot
immediately detests and undermines. More
friction and emotional chaos ensues.
Shot on 35 mm using older lenses and natural lighting in underlit
darkened exteriors by Harris Savides, this is a savagely dark comedy with only
brief traces of humor, which is instead dominated by a foul cruelty that
expresses itself in strange ways, like the unwanted string of personal
critiques coming from Margot towards her 12-year old son Claude’s (Zane Pais)
entrance into puberty with the first emergence of body odor, the strange and
cruel neighbors next door who want them to chop down an immense tree that
borders their property, claiming the roots are rotting, poisoning their plants,
and the disappearance of a well-liked family dog.
The first collaboration of Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh
after their marriage in 2005 (filing for divorce five years later), the film
opens with Margot and Claude taking a train from New York to the Hamptons on
Long Island, the exclusive territory of The
Great Gatsby, which may as well be a journey back to her childhood, as
Pauline inherited their mother’s summer home, an idyllic old house on the New
England coast, so it brings back a flood of memories and stored up resentments
which come to a head almost immediately, where Margot assumes her domineering
role as the older sister, showing her true colors when she instantly reveals
information told to her in confidence that Pauline is pregnant and
intentionally hadn’t told anyone else, as she didn’t want people to believe
that’s why she was marrying Malcolm.
Pauline’s daughter Ingrid (Flora Cross) immediately becomes concerned wondering
why her mother didn’t tell her, as well as Malcolm who’s somewhat ambivalent
about becoming a father, believing this may be the stage in life where he’s not
the most important person in the world anymore.
Margot is using the wedding as an excuse to visit an undisclosed lover,
a smug popular novelist Dick (Ciaràn Hinds), whose summer home is nearby. Baumbach is an exquisite writer of believable
dialogue, like a screwball comedy writer of the 30’s, but more directly
accurate, piercing through the most embarrassing situations. When Margot is publicly enticed to climb a
tree like she did as a precocious teenager, she manages to get to the top but
is paralyzed, too frightened to get down, calling in the fire department as if
it was an official emergency. This story
reflects a growing unease that people have with each another, revealing how
people unhesitatingly poison the waters of the world around them, like opening
the floodgates of the obnoxious behavior displayed on opinion-oriented talk
radio, disparaging everyone around them while at the same time they somehow
attempt to balance a sense of trust and personal honesty with their friends and
family, and in this case an all but doomed impending marriage. Somehow, the more they try to make it work, the
worse it gets.
While this film has a feeling of incompleteness with so much
background information delayed or left out of the film completely, a bit like
entering in midair and having to figure out how to fly, but what it does show
in sharply defined characters is revealed in intimate detail, sparing nothing,
in a scathing portrait of a maladjusted family behaving like they’ve always
done, which is tear each other to shreds.
This is a no holds barred indictment of moral hypocrisy, people who use
honesty as a weapon to hold others at bay, which gives them a phony sense of
superiority. What’s unique here is that
such self-absorbed adults are behaving so wretchedly inappropriately in front
of their own children. Claude especially
is a quietly sensitive kid, played with a beautiful sense of authenticity by
Pais, but he’s subject to constant critiques from his mother even over the
smallest things, where every detail of his life comes under neverending
scrutiny, yet he’s attached to her and loves her, even if she doesn’t know how
to love him back, telling him that when he was a baby, she wouldn’t allow
anyone else to hold him, yet confesses privately “I think that was a
mistake.” Despite the horrid things
Margot says and does, Pauline is basically a forgiving soul and her maternal
instincts are more on the mark. When the
inevitable dust up with Margot reaches volatile proportions, the audience is
surprised with how quickly Pauline’s anger subsides and her more easy going
personality takes center stage. Jennifer
Jason Leigh is luminous in this role, yet her character has a surprising
passivity, where her low key nature allows her sister (and others) to trample
all over her again, yet she’s stunningly appealing displaying such an open
vulnerability. A unique and refreshingly
daring work, always smart and articulate, all the performances feel pitch
perfect in this small incendiary chamber drama, like an off-stage Broadway
production made on a miniscule budget, offering a great deal more freedom of
expression, more bang for your buck, where we may remain haunted afterwards by
the wrenchingly expressed unpleasantness of these troubled souls.
No comments:
Post a Comment