Margot at the Wedding: Movie Review (2007)

12/02/2007 Posted by Admin

Queen Bee and Wannabees

Written and directed by Noah Baumbach, 93 minutes, rated R.

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

A lot of trouble. Margot is one sly little wrecking ball of devastation, and she's not afraid to swing that ball 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.

The characters in this movie hate each other and love each other, but mostly they love to hate each other, and that gets to the sickness the movie courts. They're quick to run a knife through any emotional wound they can find and then stab it again and again, until the whole screen is smeared with the blood of caustic dysfunction. Sound like fun? When Baumbach goes for dark humor, it can be, but since he often doesn't, it isn't.

Unlike Baumbach's better movie, "The Squid and the Whale," reviewed below, "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.

The plot goes down like this: Margot and Claude travel by train to Pauline's wedding. There, they meet her intended, Malcolm (Jack Black), a former rocker cum wannabe writer who doesn't have the nerve or the talent to succeed at being either. Taking an immediate dislike of him, Margot sets out to destroy the wedding, which is complicated by Pauline's secret pregnancy and by the bitterness each sister feels for the other.

Meanwhile, meaningless subplots brew--Pauline's own crumbling marriage to Jim (John Turturro), her affair with wealthy Dick (Ciaran Hinds), and the cruelness she showers upon poor Claude, who is so dumbstruck by his mother's pill-popping mood swings, he fails to register onscreen.

If "Margot at the Wedding" had come to the fore with something interesting to say about corrupt families and sibling rivalry, which is the movie it wants to be, we might have had something here--the performances certainly are good, particularly from Leigh, who is nice to see again onscreen. But since this is one of those quirky movies designed to deliver more quirks than reality, that's not the case.

Grade: C