Margot at the Wedding: DVD Review (2008)

The driving force behind Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding" is that Margot, played by Nicole Kidman, has come to the wedding of her sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to cause trouble.

A lot of trouble.

Margot is one sly little sledgehammer of devastation, and she's not afraid to swing that hammer as far and as wide as her mood swings will carry it.

In movies, of course, the trouble with trouble is that you can only take it so far before it starts to cause thematic trouble onscreen, particularly if nothing else in the movie--a character you come to care about, a storyline you follow with interest--is there to balance the bad feelings.

"Margot at the Wedding" is a movie that feasts on bad feelings. It revels in them, it rolls in them, it splashes about in them until the screen become so thick with the murk of ill will, you're either exhausted by it or bored by it by its mid-point.

Sound like fun? When Baumbach goes for dark humor, it can be, but since he often doesn't, it isn't. "Margot" doesn't offer a single character for whom it's easy to champion. They're all just unhappy types erupting along the sidelines, either caught in melodramas of their own making, or victims of those melodramas.

One character, Margot's son, Claude (Zane Pais), might have been somebody you could have rooted for if the story had cared about him, which it doesn't, and if he wasn't presented as such a weird little misanthrope, which he is.

Unfortunately, like all of the characters in this movie, he's just another enigma here to be looked at, not explored.

Rated PG-13. Grade: C

Read the unedited review here.

View the trailer below: