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Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach's latest flick, is a pageant of dysfunctional relationships, the chief of which involves two sisters, Margot (Nicole Kidman) and Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) whose reunion on the eve of Pauline's wedding proves disastrous.
The plot unravels in a tangle of mannered hysteria -- nearly every character spends some time kicking and screaming -- and Baumbach makes little concession to his audience. He doesn't give us any reason to care about his characters, whose neuroses are broadly drawn. There's the OCD writer who drains her family emotionally. And the loopy New Ager who never stopped drifting. And the son who wants to do his mother (Baumbach is enamored with Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart). And the sexually competitive novelist who is an asshole. And, of course, the country family who hate the "civilized."
And Baumbach pastes an allegory -- a rotting tree -- to the surface of this film, like a bushy mustache, so it will pass as storytelling.
Baumbach can make a good movie. His 2005 hit The Squid and the Whale covered much of the same territory as Margot -- family relationships, artistic narcissism, adolescent sexuality -- but handled the material with satire and nuance. Margot seems like the backstory that Squid didn't need, the overwrought, predictable, and ultimately dull entanglements of family.
Margot wastes the talents of Kidman and Leigh, who bring more naturalism to their characters than the overwritten dialogue demands. It's not just that Baumbach's script sucks. He also can't keep his camera still and then he edits his shaky cinematography until it's little more than a montage of close-ups. He doesn't give his actors room to act. And the film looks like a rehearsal of discarded French New Wave gestures.
The film is like a mugging, in more ways than one. Playing the affianced slacker, Jack Black comes beamed in from some different movie. He delivers his lines as if they were hilarious. Indeed, he got the biggest laugh from the audience last night -- in the midst of confessing a pedophilic affair to his bride-to-be.
In the end, Baumbach can't resolve any of the film's quandries and cops out. No amount of fancy filmmaking can cover for a script that has no characters, resolution, or even clever turns of phrase. Before making his next film, Baumbach needs to pass his screenplay to a friend. With a pen full of red ink.
Margot at the Wedding opens Wednesday in wide release
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